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A devastating assessment of the course of technology growth last Friday from technology analyst Forrester flies in the face of what competitive firms would consider "conventional wisdom," to say that before cloud computing truly commands the attention of enterprise network architects, a few other dramas currently in progress must play themselves out first.

At the center of one of these dramas is a player that officially exited the enterprise computing market in November 2010: Apple. The reason: Apple makes a tablet that CxOs really want. Many may not actually know how it integrates with their networks, but unlike most any technology purchase to date, they're willing to invest in it now and figure out the solutions down the road.

With yesterday's reveal of the iPad now past, we can finally put myth and speculation behind us and focus on the reality that is Apple's entry into the tablet PC business. Whether the iPad is revolutionary or evolutionary is still hotly debated, but what we do know is that the computer, despite its elegance and blazing fast speed, is a decidedly first-generation device. Although one day after the product's announcement may be too soon to discuss what's coming in the next version of the iPad, we've already come across several reasons to wait... and some of those reasons are hidden away in the new iPad SDK (software development kit) itself.

UPDATE, March 2, 2011. Version 2 of the iPad arrived just over 13 months after we published this post. Click here to check it out: All the Details on Apple's iPad 2: Specs, Pricing, Release Date

According to data released earlier this month by the US Census, the growth of the nation's software and IT tech sectors dramatically slowed in 2008 - the first such drop since the dot-com crash. Overall, revenue still grew, just at a slower rate - 7.7% - than in 2007 when growth hit 13.2%. The 2008 numbers (PDF) are the agency's most current figures, and they reveal an industry that earned significantly less on design and development work than it did just a year before. Revenue growth from other services, as well as exports, also slowed.

At least one industry analyst says that, based on anecdotal evidence, the Census numbers are too low. But others say that it was clear that many sectors were changing their spending habits and feeling the pangs of the building recession. The question is, are we out of that dip or will 2010 produce similar numbers?