, 2 min read
My predictions for year 2007
Let’s be daring for 2007:
- We will see something like “Google Games”.- We will see something like “Google Slides/PowerPoint”. Google will offer a full office suite on the Web and it will be pretty good for 80% of the office tasks.
- Governments will take tougher measures to stop spam and other illegal online behavior. We will see a lot more cybercops around.- Television will become more irrelevant than ever.- Apple will continue to grow and gain mindshare.- Since all machines will be connected all the time on the Web, OS-agnostic Web-based office software will be a big deal by the end of 2007 and it will start to make a dent in Microsoft’s monopoly to the point where Microsoft will have to acknowledge it and start reacting, in some way. We will come to see this as the end of an era: the operating system and office software will become secondary. The Open Document Format will gain some real mindshare, mostly in Europe.
- Ontologies, queries by natural language processing, Semantic Web, all these things will fail to make a dent in Google’s monopoly.
- Blogging will still be popular. Maybe the number of blogs will go down, but the quality of the remaining blogs will be good and the technology will improve. There will be tricks beyond ping/talkback to network the various blogs.
- Occidental universities will increasingly focus on continuing education. We will see more and more quality offers to complete one’s education with a master degree or certificate taken online. While it has been a secondary, and not so interesting, cash cow so far, it will become a vital issue in many universities as the number of foreign students starts to diminish.- Video blogging will be common: I’ll be subscribed to at least two video blogs.- Videoconferencing will be mainstream. My wife, my colleagues will be using it regularly. We will finally have “phones with pictures” though we will be using our computers to get the desired effect.- Within academia, posting talks on the web using digital video will become common.- The WS-* SOA stack will still go nowhere.- For less than 4000$, I will be able to buy a PC or the equivalent, with 10 TB of storage.- Carrying a laptop will be out. People will carry tiny computers, as cell phones are, but laptops are too large to be convenient. With most of our data and applications on the Web, we will stop breaking our backs. Hotels will start offering nice computers you use to do real work.