"Some of the changes you talk about may take longer, IMO."
I can understand you feel that way. Sometimes I feel that I'm all whack for expecting change so fast... But I expect these changes because of gigantic technological catalysts. First there were weblogs, then twitter, government 2.0 has really taken off under Obama, crowdsourcing, etc etc.

Especially the increased networking through blogs, Friendfeed and Twitter will result in a huge boost in creativity. I think we only have just set the stage for much more radical IT innovations than we've seen. In particular, I expect that P2P IT (that is, not dependent on corporations, using only the internet and local computing power) will get so good that together with voluntary user input (let's call that part of the system "crowdsourcing", we already have millions of people voluntarily blogging now) we'll have a system that can made better resource allocation decisions than our financial system. That will be the point when we power down the stock markets. and the bankers can enjoy some vacation.

Of course, this won't happen as described above. We'll see much more stages in between. It might even be the financial system will simply "mirror" the "decisions" of the new system, because investors will look more and more at information from the new system.

BTW. I recommend you check out Friendfeed. It's much better than Twitter for conversations. It'll be worth your time. I'm at http://friendfeed.com/meryn