Mark stahlman has zeal for technology's future that reminds you of your favorite professor in college. Attending a tech conference recently, he e-mailed: "I'm here in Las Vegas, and HP is about to report!" This with the enthusiasm of someone headed for high-stakes-table action at the Bellagio. At 55, former Alex. Brown & Sons analyst Stahlman has carved out a rep as a tech-trend prophet who had called the sector's bust and now sees a muted boom. Today this futurist thinks that the next big thing is something called "virtual computing." This is a system that promises to eliminate hard drives and programs on desktop computers. Everything will be handled out of a central database, meaning good times ahead for servermakers like Sun Microsystems and diversified equipment manufacturers and service providers like IBM.
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