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Yet Another 2005 Prediction List
Scoble's list of 2005 predictions inspired me to do a little crystal ball gazing this week. Naturally, if even one of these comes to pass, I'll look much smarter than I actually am. Firefox's browser share will be surpassed by new non-MSFT HTML browser for Windows.
Yes, Firefox is nice, and more importantly, isn't yet a target for malware. And yes, a lot of people who work near the corner of 156th St. NE and NE 40th Ave. expect Google to release a browser any day now. Despite all of this, my money is on Apple taking Safari to Windows and quickly becoming the browser to beat.
Sun Microsystems will embrace Eclipse.
Eclipse 3.x is now way above the "good enough" bar and has IBM's deep pockets behind it. In 2005, Sun will cut its losses on Netbeans and do the right thing for Java by unifying on a common tool platform.
The term SOA will have been beaten to death and the software industry will invent or recycle some equally vague term to replace it.
The term has zero differentiation value at this point and marketing teams across the globe are looking to coin a replacement that will give them something more interesting to say about their middleware than "we move messages around really well." If "Business Agents" become the buzzword de l'année, I expect Mary Jo Foley to hunt me down and kill me.
Intel and/or AMD will find a way to market (if not actually build) a 6Ghz CPU.
As the competition heats up, I predict at least one vendor will start selling CPUs branded as 6Ghz or greater by year's end. Whether this happens by branding multicores based on the sum of the clock speeds or through more creative redefinitions of Ghz, if the result is a bump in sales, the industry will happily embrace the new measure.
BEA won't change hands.
Again, conventional wisdom says that BEA is ripe. This has been the case for at least the last two years - I'm convinced that BEA will last the year without being acquired. Moreover, I would expect at least one high-profile acquisition or hire in 2005 to counter the perceived bleeding of talent in 2004.
Despite some interesting and useful new technologies being announced, PDC 2005 will be seen as a let down.
Microsoft PDCs have been like Star Trek films - the "even" numbered PDCs are far better than the "odd" numbered PDCs. 2000 in Orlando (.NET) and 2003 in LA (Longhorn) were "even" numbered PDCs and both were fantastic. 1999 in Denver (NT5 redux (we really mean it this time)) and 2001 in LA (hailstorm) were lackluster. Next year's PDC has the challenge of overcoming this pattern, which is doable (I believe Star Trek Film #9 broke the streak), however, PDC 2003 was so well executed it's going to be very hard to match it, let alone exceed it.
Miguel de Icaza will leave Novell and join Google.
Miguel will announce he's bored and will start a public bidding war. Microsoft will step aside as Miguel goes to Google and brings C# with him. The biggest upside is that Josh Bloch will finally write the book he's destined to write - Effective C#.
Mac OS X Media Center Edition.
It's so obvious I can't believe it hasn't happened yet. Far more obvious than a Tablet PC knock-off. Sorry Robert.
XML Query, the Semantic Web, and WS-* will continue to hold promise.
This is the polite way of saying that none of the above will have an explosive burst of adoption in 2005. XML Query will be lucky to be in CR by the end of 2005 (it has a huge surface area). The semantic web and RDF still require way too much deep geekery to grok. The WS-* stack will stabilize in 2005, but without platform-level support (which won't really emerge until 2006), its scope is limited to early adopters.
Scoble will make the cover of a major national news magazine.
No I don't expect his Scobleness to be named man of the year, but I do believe the blog bubble will continue to grow well into 2005 to the point where Scoble will be held up as one of several emblematic corporate bloggers to grace the cover of Time, Newsweek, Businessweek, etc.. If this doesn't happen, then I predict Scoble will fulfill Pirillo's prediction and get fired for trying to make it happen, which unfortunately won't be newsworthy enough to land his mug on a cover. Again, sorry Robert.
Posted
Dec 29 2004, 01:08 AM
by
don-box
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