Jester’s technology predictions for 2009
3 January 2009 - Filed under Tech Notes
New year predictions carry more excitement than new year resolutions. When it comes to technology, here are my takes, listed in no particular order:
-
Blu-ray succumbs to a decade-old technology called… DVD.
In January 2008, HD-DVD, one of the two contending next-generation disc storage media formats, lost the war against Blu-ray. But the time it took the industry to settle on a standard cost everyone dearly; it turns out both formats have lost after all. Blu-ray sales never picked up in the past 12 months and never will. Consumers will instead stick to plain old DVD discs, terabytes of hard disk storage, and intelligent gadgets that can store hundreds of hours of high-definition video delivered both online and offline. The widespread availability and affordability of DVD titles, blank DVD media, and hard disk storage will prevent the Blu-ray technology from reaching its critical mass. Bad news for Sony. -
Affordable mobile broadband renders many government-led infrastructure initiatives irrelevant, including Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN).
Lately, NBN has been the hot potato of technology headlines and debates throughout Australasia. Telstra may not win the customer satisfaction award, but it may have done the right thing by pulling out of the bid. Plans to deliver a technology that’s needed right now 7-8 years later surely need to be “rationalised.” Besides, mobile broadband can bypass all that and provide a sufficiently large proportion of customers with a sufficiently fast connectivity for a sufficiently low price tag, today – and even better in six months’ time from now. As for the NBN bid, whichever player ends up winning it, they will have no choice but to radically rationalise the proposed technology and really agonise over what can be promised for A$4.7 billion of taxpayer money. -
Browser war: Firefox and Safari win, everyone else loses out.
Continuing on with the observed trend, the Web browser market will see a stronger share of Mozilla Firefox throughout 2009. As Apple sells more iPhones, iPod touches, and Mac hardware, the market share of Safari will also increase. The minor browsers including Google Chrome will stay minor. A forecast for December 2009? Internet Explorer 55%; Mozilla Firefox 32%; Apple Safari 12%; the rest combined <1%. -
Microsoft announces Windows 7, keeps selling Windows XP throughout 2009.
Windows Vista officially becomes the second Windows Millennium Edition when Microsoft hurriedly releases Windows 7 in 2009. But most corporate customers will continue to use Windows XP at least until the end of 2010. -
Virtualisation comes to everyone’s desk.
End-users of small and big computing environments are highly likely to experience some degree of virtualisation this year though they may not notice it. IT professionals who haven’t embraced server virtualisation, desktop virtualisation, and application virtualisation by the end of 2009 will face trouble career-wise. Most laptops in development and staging environments will have 4-8GB of RAM and will host two or more virtual machines in them. For the first time, 64-bit Windows operating systems will be given a serious thought for both host and guest machines.
2009-01-03 » JK