Well Christmas is over, time for the Top 10 Predictions for 2008
My last Top 10 was very popular and if you review it you will see that I hit a few and missed a few. The following predictions are mine and mine alone. So without further ado:
10. Software Security Audits will become mandatory. In this day-and-age, the need to check the software before it goes into production to ensure it does not include any potential “nasties” will become front line for any companies that have exposed assets.
9. .NET will be labeled as fat and bloated. If you look at the news releases for Java compared to .NET they are almost exactly the same with about 3 years difference. Things from 3 years ago in the Java community are hitting the .NET community today. It was about 3 years ago that Java started to get labeled at fat and bloated, supporting too many things and having way-too-many APIs. .NET is not immune to the same issues and the industry will start writing about it soon, if .NET is on the same lifecycle, which I believe it is, this will be a big new story this year.
8. Microsoft Vista will continue to be adopted but not sell. Some of the latest stats show over 90 million copies of Vista have been sent. This does not appear to be purchased through the normal channels, much more to the fact that new computers now come with it. So this year that will continue and even after Microsoft releases a service patch for Vista the sales will be sluggish, but over time Vista will become the dominate OS, just like XP finally did. By the by, if you review the write-ups for XP from 2003 and 2004 you will see the same things being said about XP as you see stated about Vista.
7. MAC OS will be available for non-Apple machines. It is not that far away and if Apple wanted to they could. It would mean a new era for Apple having to support a mass-amount of new hardware, but it could be done with a limited hardware support approach. Meaning the MAC OS is available if you have this hardware. If you look at sites like http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/build-a-hackintosh-mac-for/ it can be done.
6. Web 2.0 and beyond will continue to gain. Well, that is one prediction from a few years ago that I did not get right. AJAX appears to be here to stay, and the amount of frameworks/libraries being created for that approach continue to grow both in numbers and also in advanced functionality. It does not appear that this will be going away anytime soon.
5. Social Networking will start to consolidate. When I was away from Borland/CodeGear for a year, I worked as VP of Products for a social networking company and the growth of that industry is staggering. Large purchases like MySpace, YouTube, and investments in Facebook is just the beginning. These were the big-boys getting into the market, or to fill functionality deficits in there network presence. But, other companies will be picked-up for the unique approach, or functionality, or member list in the next acquisition phases. Look for a major consolidation around this area of functionality over the next year or two.
4. Enterprises will still not adopt Ruby, yet. Ruby is a fun and actually exciting approach to developing Web applications. It is still not widely used in the Enterprise and I don’t see that changing over the next year. Because of the major investments that enterprise organizations have invested in other web-based technologies it will be a while (maybe 2009) during a re-visit of those older-purchased technologies before the look at Ruby as a real solution. I hope I’m wrong on this one, because Ruby does bring a nice clean approach to developing web based applications compared to other technologies in the market today. Plus, CodeGear has an awesome Ruby IDE called 3rd Rail built on top of the Eclipse framework… so if you are doing Ruby you owe it to yourself to check out 3rd Rail.
3. Data Mashups will be all the rage. Haven’t heard the term Mashup in our industry? Check out the link from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29 it explains the concept around mashups very well. The one that interest me the most is the data mashup, getting to the data is always a major key in our business and any approach that can help facilitate that is always exciting. So keep an eye out for data mashups in the coming year.
2. Application Factories will be the natural progression of Software Archeology. If you have read my CodeGear blog, or participated in CodeRage II, or participated in some of the webinars I’ve been giving, then you know that I have a soft spot for Software Archeology. One of the concepts of Software Archeology is around harvesting functionality to be re-used in future developments. The new Application Factories that CodeGear has been talking about is a full realization of the harvesting, and the tools to make it common-place and will give a more producer-consumer approach to software development. For more information on Application Factories, check out the recorded presentation from CodeRage II: http://video.codegear.com/coderage/ragewithus.exe/convert?track=&page=allsessions.html#REFNO1055
1. Open Source will be the “killer” market tool of large companies. Well it had to happen, the use of Open Source as a weapon with regards to competition. Now Open Source has always been about sharing of ideas and concepts and some say creating new businesses. But now it appears that large software organization are starting to use it as a “competition-leveler.” Meaning that in a particular field, a product is doing exceptionally well, instead of releasing a competitive product that will have to be “sold” to the marketplace, the organization will release an open-source alternative to the commercial software, hope that the user community will participate in making the software better, then once a marketplace has been established and the competition has been or is starting to be leveled, they will introduce a new version that has additional features or support that the consumer will pay for.�
You might ask if this is really any different then the old days? In my opinion, yes, in the old days, a company that wanted to introduce a competitive product or get into a new marketplace would have to pay big-dollars for the development, pay big-dollars for the market penetration with both sales and marketing, and have to really fight tooth-and-nail for any market penetration. Today these large organizations can drastically slow or even stop adoption of a new technology by introducing a FREE open source alternative, thus potentially stopping the marketshare lead. They can get help from the community from a development standpoint, which lowers the investment cost of R&D, if the community is vibrant they can supplement the release cycle by using the community for both R&D and Q&A, and finally they put real price pressure on the competitions organization. That price pressure could lead the market leader to possibly lowering the R&D spend now needed for marketing and establising market presence, which could slow the progress or functionality released to the market, which could lead to consumers moving to other technology because the market leader is not producing as fast, and with as many features as before. Don’t think it is already happening, check out this market nugget: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2216435,00.asp Company has 80% of the market today, and by 4 years from now only 8%! Is Open Source the new mega-corporation tool to kill or seriously hurt new market leaders? I think it is.
About item 1, seems that it also applies to JBuilder and IntelliJ®IDEA too.
December 26th, 2007 at 5:29 pm>> 8. Microsoft Vista will continue to be adopted but not sell.
Customers who bought a new pc always come to us and request downgrade to XP. I have installed XP on 99 out of 100 newly bought computers.
Vista will never make it.
December 26th, 2007 at 9:53 pm> 9. .NET will be labeled as fat and bloated.
I think that ship has sailed.
December 26th, 2007 at 11:14 pmLex, if I understand your comment… IBM’s open sourcing of VisualAge 2 as Eclipse may be one of the early examples of this tactic. At the time JBuilder was in the clear lead in market share and also innovation. VisualAge 2 for Java when it was released as Eclipse was not the product the Eclipse 3.3/3.4 is today, is was much more basic. However, CodeGear may be one of the first to adopt the framework as a better way to compete and take advantage of the eco-system the mega-corporation created around Eclipse.
I personally believe that IBM set out to create a new way to support development and build a strong community around an open-framework. I think it worked better then anybody at IBM could have believed… not only did they get a large community to help them develop the Eclipse framework both from a development and concept stand-point, but they were able to consume that innovation for themselves and release a commercial product that is 3X the price of JBuilder and has less built in features and sells very well to large enterprises. It was a great strategic move from IBM if that was the actual plan when they made the initial 40 million in investment to the Eclipse project.
Today, CodeGear also consumes the work done with Eclipse to bring new functionality, better integration of the tools we have created over the last 20+ years and now since we are not focusing a major portion of the team toward IDE framework infrastructure work, those developers can be focused on the new value-add functionality being added to both JBuilder and the new Ruby on Rails IDE 3rd Rail also based on Eclipse.
So CodeGear may be the ultimate evolution of the strategy from a mega-corporation point of view. The attacked company actually starts basing the technology on the mega-corporations competitive open source structure and adds more value to it then the competition and brings its considerable underlying knowledge to the product and win by out innovating on top of the open source foundation.
Check out number 2 for what I mean about new innovation to development.
December 26th, 2007 at 11:22 pmTo me .NET goes back to the old discussion about either: software needing to contain all its own recourses or else to share these with other software. Basically between the MS-DOS approach and DLL hell.
.NET is basically the latest try in the long line of .DLL, COM and COM+. All considered, great breakthroughs in technology and must have’s at the time (Microsoft is great in marketing and making money), while later showing the same basic problems.
The basic truth in IT has always been that it is better to use the old and tested technologies, as they are likely to stay and not undergo any major changes, while most IT’ers tend to prefer to use the latest technology/ hype. The simple question, why .NET is really essential for a software project, is often not asked.
Basic tip to all for any new software meant for use on the desktop.
Write Win32 software (with Delphi) that: when called ‘setup.exe’, copies itself to C:\MyDirectory, renames itself MyProgram.exe, makes the necessary shortcuts and no more (no registration). If you need to use a database use TClientDataSet with CreateTable and save in binary format. Don’t use OOP and just go for long well named long globals. When Delphi is not enough, and you need some Windows functionality, use only old core Windows API calls.
The truth is that most will call you mad but also that your software will be hard to beat. This as it can develop and grow in unexpected way’s without being hindered by its OOP model or Microsoft latest changes on how Windows handles formerly correct software.
December 30th, 2007 at 4:07 am