Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Better by design (27 Sep 2005) This is a testament to PLM's success, but paradoxically could cause it to disappear. “I'm not sure PLM will survive as a stand-alone category,” says Mr Radjou. Instead, he says, PLM functions will be broken down and bundled into other applications, such as supply-chain management systems and even desktop productivity software. Oracle, the world's second-largest software company, will probably buy one of the PLM vendors and incorporate its software into its general business suite, Mr Radjou predicts. Microsoft is working to add collaboration and document-sharing features to its Office suite. So PLM could become almost as ubiquitous as PowerPoint presentations or Word documents—but by then it will almost certainly be called something other than “product life-cycle management”. It is the hallmark of a successful technology that it becomes almost invisible. And so the final, triumphant stage in the gradual ascent of PLM could be that it disappears altogether. Article URL: http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4368176 Read 80 more articles from Economist sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Death to folders!          Books about Usability | Information Architecture | Information Visualisation | Technology History This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy