With the caveat that 90+% of these predictions are just blowing smoke, what do you see interesting happening in 2009? Stock market continuing to tank? Larger war in the middle east? SETI (or SETI on the Allen Telescope Array) finally getting a hit? New types of web apps taking off?
1) SAAS will continue to grow and 2009 is the year where it will enter the mainstream with at least one IPO or major sell to a large established company.
2) Jquery will beat the other javascript frameworks and become the de facto standard for doing javascript.
3) Startups will stop focusing on B2C markets and move into the B2B market, primarily SAAS. Greentech will also surge ahead fueled be the Obama administration's policies and money.
4) Venture capitalism will be redefined. The mix of the plunging cost of doing a software startup and companies like Ycombinator and others will force VC's to move into greentech and away from software. VC's will face financial problems due to a slump in the market and at least one major VC will tank.
Tightly coupled, IMO.
> 2) Jquery will beat the other javascript frameworks and become the de facto standard for doing javascript.
I hope not. Love jQuery. Hate monopolies. This is in much the same way that Rails defines Ruby to some people - I hope jQuery doesn't define JavaScript in the future.
What's the meeaning of the word "monopoly" in a situation where breaking the monopoly means switching to another library? A library which, by the way, won't exist unless someone sees significant enough failings in the existing one to create an alternative, from scratch or through a fork.
Barrier to entry is the property which enables abusive monopolies, and in the open source world, is there such a thing?
Consider emacs, for instance. Elisp sucks in many ways, and we could probably build a better emacs if we started from scratch. But it will be very tough to get from here to there.
I do predict larger government involvement in health care. Electronic medical records is political gold (Bush, McCain and Obama all agree), and lobbyists will be involved. Invest in the medical records software vendor with the best political connections.
Some biostatistics software startups might hit it big too, depending on regulatory conditions (legal question: how do you datamine medical records without violating privacy?).
You make it a condition of using the service.
23andme + Google Health
- Most people are expecting a downturn uptick in open source development because there will be more unemployed engineers, but unemployed engineers need to pay rent, put food on the table, etc. so developing open source code will be a luxury like subscribing to premium cable channels. Instead, they'll be fully focused on finding work.
- Because being part of a team of people working on open source apps can help engineers get a job, expect people to 'join' projects for resume purposes but not really have the time (or desire) to participate.
- Desperate times call for desperate measures and when engineers are considering taking their substantial code base and making it open source, I believe they are less likely to do it during a bad economy simply because there are fewer ways to profit from that move.
- And, on a tangential note, I expect the biggest winners during 2009 will ultimately be the drug companies -- especially those that produce anti-anxiety pills.
My two cents.
There was a big slowdown in the open source world in the years after the first dot com bubble burst; I have no doubt that there will be another slowdown in the 2009-2010 timeframe.
I'd actually expect open source to gain more contributors if there's a whole bunch of unemployed software developers.
If you're looking for work, you're still going to have a lot of free time.
On the other hand, perhaps we'll just see an increase in users at sites like reddit and News.YC instead.
The thing I find most impressive about these sites is how they have managed to harness the power of people's free time. With more unemployment, I'd expect these sites to see some growth.
So I'm going to predict that we'll see more of these kinds of sites which are designed to harness the power of people who are bored... that's basically what web 2.0 is all about right? ;-)
- Most people in the news who are making 2009 predictions are overestimating the amount of new tech developments that will happen in 2009. With the economic situation, it will be a generally slow year.
- The personal health records space will heat up, with more hospitals and employers supporting HealthVault, Google Health, etc.
- The smartphone will have a great year, spurred by great competition, free platforms, hungry vendors, and features that appeal to customers. The iPhone will continue to grab market share from all other smartphone OSes (except Android).
- BlackBerry will stagnate and eventually (post-2009) go the way of Palm unless it changes its platform and strategy somehow. The outlook for Symbian isn't rosy either.
- Phone manufacturers will fall in love with Android. Even though Symbian will be free as well, phone manufacturers will be wary of using a rival's platform (Nokia). There will be a bunch of Android devices on the market by year's end.
- If Apple launches a large touchscreen device apart from a tablet laptop, it will be a failure. I just can't see this happening.
Look to see 25-30% cutbacks in spending for the industry leaders (Google, Microsoft, IBM) and tech startups (the funded ones) to tighten belts for real this time.
It may seem bad now, but the tech sector all and all has been nearly immune to the economic downturn compared to other industries (retail, auto, financial, and real estate).
The tech companies that will contract least will be ones who cater to the entertainment market (games primarily).
Hopefully I don't sound too pessimistic. Personally, I've been happily employed throughout the downturn, making as much or more than I'd been getting in the boom times. However I have pretty good second hand view (from friends and family) on other parts of the economy so I'm bracing for the same impact on tech.
Solid-state disks will probably make average load and response times for desktop-based applications significantly drop for the first time since the introduction of the GUI. By the end of 2009, people will have different expectations of computer response time.
Perhaps more importantly, the increased read speeds will be used by someone to work some database magic that's never been seen before. I'm not sure what the killer app will be.
Android will not become dominant in any meaningful sense, but Google will sustain it as a platform.
2. war between android and iphone, new iphone format released, between 20+ android handsets also released
3. facebook omnipresence, it's the new Yahoo!
1. Around 2009 Q3, the tech industry will be the first to recover from the downturn (before real-estate or auto).
2. Twitter will show dramatic growth, and it will be acquired by Google
3. Google Chrome will show growth, and scare the shit out of Firefox and IE
4. A new product/service will be release by Sun or IBM, that will gain major traction among the hacker community
5. Paris Hilton will get hitched
Un-fettered markets are not the end solution but they are far better than the current politically controlled markets.
The handouts are damaging on two fronts. Firstly, it rewards poor businesses and stops better firms entering the market. Secondly, Joe Public who made dumb financial decisions are not punished but instead everything is done to allow them to make more damaging decisions later on.
The current debt loading of the US currency is not sustainable at the current levels of productivity. The US looks more and more like the USSR of the late 80s, running as fast as it knows and still sliding into bankruptcy.
I rather think we are looking at the end of the US as a going concern.
I'm hopeful that a short civil war will ensue and that out of that there might be the chance for a small Capitalist/Anarchist state to be founded.
Feudalism, Democracy, Fascism, Socialism and Communism have all failed the acid test. What other forms of government do we have? It would seem that Karl Marx was the last political thinker to offer a new idea for governmental organization.
1. Web apps will start to die, and will start being replaced by web connected desktop or device apps
2. Integrated and restricted stores for distributing software by the major players
3. Some company that is still using spinning media will dissolve the entire line and switch to solid state media
4. Stock market will quickly rebound within the first quarter
5. TV will move mostly online
- Amazon Kindle 2 will be a huge hit and trigger a frenzy of copycats
- Facebook continues it's fast growth and a few other social networks stop growing and go on the decline. Facebook Connect gains big traction.
- OpenSocial becomes the largest platform on the Web around the end of 2009 after they clean up the garbage that's the current version