I didn't know what else to call this topic, but it is meant as more of a designer's quandary: how do you effectively design in an environment where the technology is always advancing? If you know your project will take two years to complete, do you plan to include tools / platforms / paradigms from other vendors that you think will be ready a year from now? How do you leverage Advancing Technology during development? -- JeffChapman

*One helpful approach may be to look at the subcomponents of the technology your design depends on.  For example... One of the frustrations of trying to build financial services systems that would run on PCs in the late 1980s was that it took us so long to build one relative to its effective life span, that we were continuously having to start over, and seemed to be falling further behind.  The suggestion that allowed us to break out of this pattern came from someone who attended the technology shows that the PC 'manufacturers' attended.

*Simply put, we learned to design our solutions to run on the computers that would be available at about the time we expected to finish our software development, rather than on the computers that were currently available.  This did, of course, depend on the relative lengths of the various development cycles for the PCs we were buying, and the software we were writing.  (I can expand on this if there is any interest.) -- HansWobbe.

The other question that comes to mind during the design process is that since technology has advanced to SoManyPlatforms what do you design for?  Should it be required nowadays during design that we plan for an application to run on a BlackBerry, FireFox, a DesktopWindowsClient, and as a WebService?

''If these are treated as interfaces and abstracted from the solution, then adding for new technology is a simple matter of adding to the interfaces.''
*... well, ''ideally'' it would be a "simple matter".  And ''sometimes'' it is (it's getting better).  However, ''certain'' companies seem to delight in making technology that crosses these different systems more difficult to write in order to maintain competitive edge. 

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AdvancingTechnology has an interesting side-effect: the wide variety of client-side interfaces (to data and methodologies) is beginning to merge the UserInterface across platforms.  Not so much the "how", but the LookAndFeel.  Presumably this is so you feel as much at home on your BlackBerry as sitting in front of your WindowsVista computer.