Boston (MA) - You don't have to go to a technology conference. Instead, spend one hour alone at mid-afternoon in a restaurant, an airport, a subway car, or any public place with 100 or more people. Shut off the iPod and the BlackBerry, and stow your earbuds. Listen to the conversations of the people around you. If you're as attentive as I've been in recent years, you might notice at least one conversation in six involves information technology - more specifically, people trying to make sense of it, so they can put their businesses back together.

It isn't as though everyone wants to be information technology specialists, or that they necessarily feel they're cut out for the role. On paper, these people are nurses, paralegals, police officers, agricultural technicians, travel agents. Whether they made a conscious decision about their destinies or were drafted into the role, they have become IT specialists. For years, even decades, we who started out in technology have been searching for our place in the mainstream, like salmon maniacally swimming up a river. The search may be over at last; the mainstream has found us.

When we talked with and listened to attendees at Microsoft's TechEd 2006 conference in Boston last week, we learned that a growing number of them were there less out of desire than necessity. This isn't really Microsoft's fault; unlike E3, whose purpose is to generate buzz, TechEd's explicit purpose is to educate. And as Windows evolves - as it swims upstream from its own swamp of problems and inconsistencies - its subject matter grows ever more perplexing. Sure, I'm interested in Group Policy Objects, SHA-2 encryption, BitLocker, firewalls, PowerShell. But a growing number of my peers don't want to care about the technology they're struggling with; right now, what they care about most is making their business work, and feeding their families. New acronyms don't satisfy these folks the way a new expansion pack satisfies a gamer.