2014 Tech Predictions

Technology and related predictions for 2014.

03 January 2014

Here we go again: the annual review of last year's predictions, and a set of new ones for the new year.

2013 Retrospective

Without further ado, first we examine last year's Gregorian prognostications:

    <ul>
      <li>
        <p>
          <b>THEN:</b>
          <i>"Big data" and "data analytics" will dominate the enterprise landscape.</i>
        </p>
        <p>
          <b>NOW:</b> Yeah, it was a bit of a slam dunk breakaway kind of call, but it clearly

counts. Vendors and consulting companies were climbing all over themselves to talk
about "big data", and startups basing their existence on gathering, analyzing, displaying
and (theoretically) offering insight from "big data" were all the rage in the startup
community, such as local startup Predixion (CTO'ed
by a buddy of mine). If you live anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, chances are there's
a similar kind of startup within spitting distance of you right now. 1-0.

  • THEN: NoSQL buzz will start to diversify.

    NOW: It didn't happen quite as much as I'd expected, but the various vendors are, in fact, starting to use terms other than "NoSQL" to define themselves. In particular, we're seeing database vendors (MongoDB, Neo4J, Cassandra being my principal examples) talking about being a "document database" or a "graph database" instead of being a "NoSQL" database, though they're fairly quick to claim the NoSQL tag when it comes to differentiating against the traditional relational database. Since I said "start" to diversify, I'm going to take the win. 2-0.

  • THEN: Desktops increasingly become niche products.

    NOW: Well, this one is hard to call. Yes, desktop sales have plummeted, but it's hard to see what those remaining sales are being used for. I will point out that the Mac Pro, with it's radically-different internal construction, definitely puts a new spin on the desktop, but I'm not sure that this counts. Since I took the benefit of the doubt on the last one, I'll forgot it on this one. 2-1.

  • THEN: Home servers will start to grow in interest.

    NOW: I wish I had sales numbers to go with some of this stuff, as hard evidence, but the fact that many people are using their console devices (XBox, XBoxOne, PS3, PS4, etc) as media servers means I missed the boat on this one. I think we may still see home servers continue to rise, but the clear trend has been to make the console gaming device into a server, and not purchase servers on their own to serve as media servers. 2-2.

  • THEN: Private cloud is going to start getting hot.

    NOW: Meh. I see certain cloud vendors talking about private cloud, but for the most part the emphasis is still on public cloud. 2-3. Not looking good for the home team.

  • THEN: Oracle will release Java8, and while several Java pundits will decry "it's not the Java I love!", most will actually come to like it.

    NOW: Well, let's start with the fact that Java8 actually didn't ship this year. And even that, what I would have guessed would be a hugely-debated and hotly-contested choice, really went by without much fanfare or complaint, except from some of the usual hard-liner complaint sources. Which means one of two things: either (a) it's finally come to pass that most of the people developing on top of the JVM really don't care about the Java language's growth anymore, or (b) the community felt as Oracle's top engineering brass did, that getting this release "right" was far better than getting it out on the promised deadline. And while I agree with the (b) group on that, it still means that the prediction was way off. 2-4.

  • THEN: Microsoft will start courting the .NET developers again.

    NOW: Quite frankly, this one got left in dust almost the moment that Ballmer's retirement was announced. Whatever emphasis the company as a whole might have put into courting .NET developers back into the fold was immediately shelved, at least until a successor comes in to take Ballmer's place and decide what kind of strategy the company as a whole will pursue. Granted, the individual divisions within Microsoft, most notably DevDiv, continue to try and woo the developer community, but that was always going to be the case. However, the lack of any central "push" from the company effectively meant that the perceived "push" against .NET in favor of WinRT was almost immediately left behind, and the subsequent declaration of the Surface's failure (and Surface was by far the most public and prominent of the WinRT-based devices) from most corners meant that most .NET developers who cared about this breathed a sigh of relief and no longer felt those Microsoft cyclical Darwinian crosshairs (the same ones that claimed first C programmers, then C++ programmers, then COM programmers) on their back. Still, no points. 2-5.

  • THEN: Samsung will start pushing themselves further and further into the consumer market.

    NOW: And boy, howdy, did they. Samsung not only released several new versions of their various devices into the market, but they've also really pushed their consumer electronics in other form factors, too, such as their TVs and such. If there is a rival to Apple in the consumer electronics department, it is clearly Samsung, and the various court cases and patent violation filings are obvious verification of that. 3-5.

  • THEN: Apple's next release cycle will, again, be "more of the same".

    NOW: Can you say "iPhone 5c", and "iPad Air", boys and girls? Even iOS7 is basically the same OS, with a skinnier font and--oh, wow, innovation!--nested folders. 4-5.

  • THEN: Visual Studio 2014 features will start being discussed at the end of the year.

    NOW: Microsoft tossed me a major curve ball with their announcement of quarterly releases, and the subsequent release of Visual Studio 2013, and as a result, we haven't really seen the traditional product hype cycle out of the Microsoft DevDiv that we're used to. Again, how much of that is due to internal confusion over how to project their next-gen products out into the world without a clear Ballmer successor, and how much of that was planned from the beginning isn't clear, but either way, we ain't heard a peep outta nobody about C# 6 at all in 2013, so... 4-6.

  • THEN: Scala interest wanes.

    NOW: If anything, the opposite took place--Typesafe, Scala's owner/pimp/corporate backer, made some pretty splashy headlines within the JVM community, and lots of people talked a lot about it in places where Scala wasn't being discussed before. We can argue about whether that indicates just a strong marketing effort (where before Typesafe's formation there really was none) or actual growth in acceptance, but either way, I can't claim that it "waned", so the score becomes 4-7.

  • THEN: Interest in native languages will rise.

    NOW: Again, this one is hard to judge. There's been some uptick in interest in those native languages (Rust, Go, etc), and certainly there's been some interesting buzz around some kind of Phoenix-like rise of C++, but none of it has really made waves within the mainstream that I can see. (Then again, I don't really spend a lot of time in those areas where native languages would have made a larger mark, so this could be observer's contextual bias at work here.) That said, more native-based languages are emerging, and certainly Apple's interest and support in LLVM (which, contrary to it's name, is not really a "virtual machine", per se) can be seen as such, but not enough to make me feel comfortable saying I got this one right. 4-8.

  • THEN: Hardware is the new platform.

    NOW: Surface was a bust. Chromebooks hardly registered on anybody's radar. Dell threw out an arguable Surface-killer tablet, but for most consumer-minded folks it never even crossed their minds, it seems. Hardware may be the new platform, and certainly we're seeing a lot of non-x86-based machines continuing their race into consumers' hands, but most consumers don't think twice about the hardware as much as they do the visible projection of that hardware choice, in the operating system. (Think about it this way: when you go buy a device, do you care about the CPU, or the OS--iOS, Android, Windows8--running it?) 4-9.

  • THEN: APIs for lots of things are going to come out.

    NOW: Oh, my, yes. More on this later, but for now... 5-9.

    • Well, with a final tally of 5 "rights" to 9 "wrongs", clearly my 2013 record was about as win-filled as the Baltimore Ravens' 2013 record. *sigh* Oh, well, can't win 'em all every year, right?

    2014 Predictions

    Now, though, let's do the fun part: What does Ted think 2014 has in store for us geeky types?

    As always, thanks for reading, and keep this channel open--I've got some news percolating
    about my next new adventure that I'm planning to "splash" in mid-January. It won't
    be too surprising, but it's exciting (at least to me), and hopefully represents an
    adventure that I can still be... uh... adventuring... for years to come.

    Tags: predictions  

    Last modified 03 January 2014