There is a lot of excitement going around as we head towards SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas. It’s at this event that the public will get a chance to see what the next version of SharePoint will look like. That’s all well and good, but really, where is SharePoint headed, what’s the future vision for this platform?

I remember reading an article a long time back about Sony and how it plans for the future… not 5 years, 10 years, 25 years, 50 years, but 250 years in advance. Thinking in those terms isn’t supposed to be a realistic exercise to generate products for next year’s line, but it’s to clear the mind of the existing limitations of the current offerings.

I thought about that article again today as I watched the PayPal video, “Some Things Will Never Change”. What’s being said in this video? Is this what PayPal is working on? Is this something viable that could actually become available within the next 5 or 10 years? Does it really matter? I’ve embedded it below so you won’t have to hunt around.

Let’s talk about SharePoint for a second in terms of longevity. Is this a product that has “legs”, not because it comes from Microsoft, but because of what it does? It integrates with MS Office. Does that mean that Office needs to be thought of as an add-on to SharePoint? If so, we can anticipate Office going away in the not so distant future because it won’t be needed. SharePoint will come with it’s own suite of built-in tools that will mimic the functionality of the current Office suite, but will have such deep integration points, it will become part of SharePoint itself.

Microsoft professed to do this with IE as they were taking Netscape to the mat, but in this case, there’s a pretty strong argument that this is viable way to go.

What will be the future of collaborative platforms? I think it’s safe to say that most of us consider the movement of major software into the cloud as the next huge step towards true collaboration. No proprietary platform. No proprietary software. Nothing but the cloud to provide us with tools to contribute data, structured storage to manage the data and true access from anywhere, with any device.

Where does this leave SharePoint? Software as a service is a nice buzzword, but in the end, no one is going to care how it is being served, they are going to care that they can get at their data, their information, their content without having to think about anything.

You’ve seen the book, Don’t Make Me Think. That’s where the ultimate platform and interface will reside. Don’t make me think, do what I think. We jokingly talk about Johnny Mnemonic slotting in for the data feed, but isn’t that what’s happening now in a more rudimentary sense?

I saw a guy at the playground the other day. He was reading a newspaper, talking on the phone, reading email or something on another device, all while pushing his three year old daughter on the swing. What’s the big jump about just putting a slot in this guy’s head and feeding him the data he’s looking for. Remember, now, we’re thinking farther down the road than the next ten years. I don’t think it’s too far fetched to think about direct to brain slotting.

Where does that leave SharePoint? Will SharePoint transform itself to the invisible grid that can supply all data, in real time at the speed of thought? Does it have to be SharePoint? Will all applications in the cloud become one, gigantic mesh, with no bounderies between platforms?

My grandfather was born in 1900. The changes he saw in his lifetime were unimaginable to someone born in that time period. What are your grandchildren going to take for granted? What’s going to happen in the next 100 years with collaboration?

Will we really have to wait that long?