Rob Pike's Things to Build

From Rob Pike (Bell Labs/Plan9, now at Google)... Things to Build (in Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (PDF), or in Postscript format):

• Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s...
• There has been much talk about component architectures, but only one true success: Unix pipes...
• The future is distributed computation, but the language community has done very little...
• The Web model... is forced interaction; the user must go get it. Let's go back to having the data come to the user instead.
• System administration remains a deeply difficult problem...

Obvious connections to recent conversations about rich GUIs, and mobilized software, etc. I think he hits several nails square on the head.