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What’s in Store for 2010? A Few Predictions

the road ahead

“The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.” – Peter Drucker

So let’s do some predictions, shall we? True, I dislike the entire business of prediction, close cousin that it is to guessing. Which I hate. But James’ excellent thoughts on what we might see in the year ahead got me thinking about what I’m anticipating.

Maybe we see over the hill imperfectly, but the following assertions are not without their substance either. Feel free to take them with a grain of salt, several grains, or not at all. We’ll see how we did a year from now.

One thing to keep in mind about our predictions: we’re looking a bit further out than, say, Gartner. Where they are predicting that cloud computing will a strategic technology for 2010, then, we instead consider that a given. So if you’re looking for predictions like, “open source will be a mainstream option,” you’ve come to the wrong place: we figure you know that already. It doesn’t mean that Gartner’s wrong, of course; merely that we’re having an entirely different conversation.

Cloud API Proliferation Will Become a Serious Problem

When I meet with cloud providers these days, the default answer to questions about the openness or lackthereof with respect to their software is “we have an open API.” But this is, unquestionably, the wrong answer for customers. It’s not that open APIs are bad, individually: far from it. You’d rather have one than not. But how are customers to manage them as they multiply? Cloud providers should be considering Kant’s Categorical Imperative:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Unsurprisingly, however, they are not. Which means that cloud API proliferation will reach new, frightening heights in the year ahead. Or maybe you want to individually review and compare the APIs as they iterate. Watch the Deltacloud project for traction as a result; platforms with an API compatibility story like Eucalyptus should benefit as well.

On a semi-related note, I expect IaaS to remain more popular than PaaS for 2010.

Collaboration Will Never Be the Same

google_trends_wave

Google Wave was quite a splash when it landed; Mozilla Raindrop far less so. Or so says Google Trends. But both will play an important role in the fundamental reshaping of the interfaces – and in the case of Wave, infrastructure – that we all use to collaborate in the year ahead. Nor will the impacts be limited to the early adopter market those products are aimed at. As James noted, Lotus sold 1M licenses of its Connections product in two weeks to six customers. The appetite for next generation collaboration toolsets is strong, whether we’re talking about Rogers’ innovators or laggards.

But all of that may end up being the least interesting trend we see from collaboration in 2010. Of potentially greater impact are those that go beyond the interface. Github, for example, strongly incents social coding and cross pollination in ways that change the way development is done. Offerings like Gist and Threadsy, meanwhile, take a business intelligence-like approach to email, attempting to both consolidate multiple streams and process the content algorithmically according to its inter-relation. Message from your boss? Important. Someone you hear from once every two months? Less so. Neither are ready for primetime, by my testing, but they point the way forward.

And collaboration will never be the same.

Data as Revenue

I’ve written about this fairly extensively already, so I won’t belabor the point. But we’re going to see datasets increasingly recognized as a serious, balance sheet-worthy asset. Twitter pointed the way with its Bing and Google deals, and then Infochimps reinforced that value by making available, commercially, data they harvested from everyone’s favorite micro-blogging service.

This will continue. I’m fully in agreement with IBM’s Steve Mills when he says that we’re “moving into an era of information led transformation.” As margins slim and economies continue to stagnate, enterprises of all sizes will increasingly turn their eyes to data based assets, both for their latent commercial value as well as for improved decision making.

As a result, fear and concern over the privacy implications will spike.

Democratization of Big Data

cloudera_desktop

Yes, Facebook and its 24 terabytes of new content per day is an outlier. But what about the individual developer that wants to make sense of the 1.7 GB Twitter dataset that Infochimps is making available? OpenOffice.org, as I can personally report, doesn’t want anything to do with it.

Fortunately, the democratization of big data is well underway. Hadoop puts MapReduce within reach, Pig puts Hadoop within reach, and with the Cloudera desktop you even have a nice, shiny browser based GUI. Throw in Amazon, and you have as many machines as you could possibly want. We’re still a little light in the front end space, with the ability to visualize the data lagging far behind the ability to process it, but that will come. Maybe in the next year, maybe not.

But either way, the ability to work on big data will increasingly be available to any business, large or small. Democractization of Big Data, commence.

Developer Target Fragmentation Will Accelerate

Between cloud fabrics, programming language proliferation, mobile application development and the spike in development framework popularity, development targets have been fragmenting for several years now. We are more or less in full retreat from the one time promise of write once, run anywhere as an industry. I see nothing on the horizon that will throttle or even slow this trend; if anything, the increasing volume of cloud platforms and the surge in interest in mobile development will accelerate this trend.

This has significant implications for purveyors of middleware, application development tools and cloud platforms, but also for those charged with setting enterprise technology standards. The CIO’s job is going to get harder in 2010, because picking a winner from the myriad language, framework and platform options will be much more difficult than picking a safe option.

It’s All About the Analytics

Flowing Data, a blog run by PhD candidate Nathan Yau, is one of my favorites. The visualization of data is as much an art as a science, and there are few practitioners more talented. The challenge of taking data and hammering it into a form that conveys meaning and supports conclusions is, of course, an age old challenge. But the tools at our disposal are getting better, fast.

Consider the simple analytics that are available, for free, to virtually anyone today: Google Analytics for the web, Feedburner for feeds, Bit.ly for links, About:Me for the browser, Flickr Stats for pictures and so on. Emerging services like PostRank will even extend that value by consolidating various streams into a meaningful, single glance assessment of performance.

I’ve never subscribed to the idea that only what can be measured can be managed – open source, in particular, belies that claim – but there’s no debate that metrics can be immensely important in maximizing returns, and to an extent, profits.

We’re going to see analytics become, as James said, ubiquitous to the extent that they’re not already. Two projects to keep your eyes on in this space, both from IBM: the chronically underleveraged ManyEyes, and the Hadoop-backed M2. Both could – should, in my view – be important at advancing the state of analytics forward in the next year.

Marketplaces Will Be Table Stakes

Why has it taken so long for the idea of marketplaces to catch on? Don’t look at me; I’ve been banging on about them since 2006 or so. The equation has long seemed like a no brainer to me: developers and ISVs get a centralized channel and wider audience, platforms get a wider ecosystem, and customers get a more efficient discovery and acquisition process – at a minimum.

Whatever the initial reluctance, that’s over. Two plus billion Apple iTunes store downloads later, mobile players are falling all over themselves to roll out marketplaces to compete. Canonical, sponsors of the Ubuntu project, are moving towards their own software store (though, regrettably, it still doesn’t include developers as I’ve hoped for). Amazon, meanwhile, has most of the pieces it would need to sell apps, and a sustained rate of innovation that is more or less unmatched in the industry at present.

What does 2010 hold, then? Marketplaces, and a lot of them. Mobile is quickly becoming staturated, web apps and the desktop are probably next, and data marketplaces may ultimately eclipse them all. If you want to play next year, bring your marketplace. Or go home.

New Languages to Watch

Seems like we have a new hot programming language every year. Some are in it for the long haul, some fade away, and some linger in between like the undead. I’m not prepared at this point to call the winners for the next year, but two that a.) might lend themselves well to cloud and cloud-like environments and b.) are receiving disproportionately more attention relative to their erstwhile competition are Clojure and Go. The former is essentially Lisp reborn on top of the JVM, while Go borrows from C syntaticly but adds in modern language conveniences such as garbage collection without taking too much of a hit performance-wise (Go is 20-30% slower than C/C++, reportedly).

It seems unlikely that either will make significant inroads at the expense of the currently popular compiled languages such as C#/Java or the dynamic alternatives (PHP/Python/etc), but the level of attention – and the people paying attention – distinguish them from other languages aimed at concurrency like Erlang and Haskell.

NoSQL Will Bid for Mainstream Acceptance

Maybe the NoSQL label is a misnomer, and maybe Michael Stonebraker is right that NoSQL has nothing to do with SQL. Either way, I am not ready to predict that the NoSQL moniker will retired in favor of, say, AltDB.

What I will claim, however, is that projects in this space will individually and collectively make serious bids for mainstream acceptance. Cassandra, CouchDB, InfiniDB, MongoDB, Riak, Tokyo Cabinet and the like – different as they all are from one another – will position themselves not as relational replacements but complementary technologies that solve a different set of problems.

While I don’t believe the bid for mainstream acceptance will be successful generally – enterprises are too wedded to the RDBMS model, the tooling for the NoSQL projects is generally weak, etc – they will find a fertile ground in areas illsuited to the traditional relational, row-based model.

So that’s my nine. As a bonus, five predictions for free and open source software:

FOSS Predictions

  1. Usage of dual licensing will continue to decline, in part because of the Oracle and EU dispute over MySQL
  2. FOSS advocates will increasingly turn their attention from licensing to the related mechanisms of copyright and trademark
  3. Permissive licensing will continue to gain at the expense of reciprocal licensing, albeit slowly
  4. The value of project code will be eclipsed, in a few cases, by the data the project generates
  5. Open source, building from its mainstream acceptance, will emerge as the most credible alternative to proprietary cloud and mobile platforms

But that’s just what I’m seeing. What are your predictions for 2010?

Update: Nat Torkington’s done an excellent follow up that looks at the opportunity side of the above: highly recommend you go read it.

Disclosure: Basho (Riak), Canonical, Cloudera, IBM, Oracle, Sun (MySQL) are RedMonk customers. Apple, Google and Mozilla are not.

by-sa

Related posts:

  1. links for 2010-03-04
  2. Three Predictions: Languages, Databases, and Collaboration
  3. links for 2010-01-22
  4. links for 2010-01-12
  5. Who’s Going to Build the App Store for the Enterprise?

This entry was written by sogrady and posted on November 12, 2009 at 6:35 pm and filed under AltDB, Analytics, App Stores, Application Development, Collaboration, Data, Databases, Marketplaces, Open Source, Privacy. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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69 Comments

  1. niraj
    Posted November 13, 2009 at 12:14 am | Permalink

    Not a fan of your bottom toolbar. it is taking away the focus from content on the page. If you trying to make it like facebook – note that facebook bottom bar is light-small and blends in. Red for the toolbar is too strong.

  2. JasonM80
    Posted November 13, 2009 at 6:34 pm | Permalink

    Great blog post! Very thoughtful and an interesting read.
    I am interested in your prediction for cloud computing, when you suggest “I expect IaaS to remain more popular than PaaS for 2010.” Is your rationale based mostly on the proliferation of Cloud APIs and the current services available in the marketplace?

    With Amazon.com’s recent moves – introducing a MySQL-compatible RDBMS and an SDK for .NET – it seems like Amazon is moving EC2 in the direction of PaaS. These are likely aimed at competing with Microsoft (Windows Azure) for market share, but it still shows movement in that direction. Also, with the upcoming launch of Microsoft Windows Azure, a true PaaS, and likely a soon-to-be major player in the cloud computing space, PaaS will grow.

    In any case, a lot of your predictions make sense, but, as you say early on in the post, “We’ll see how we did a year from now.”

    (I am collaborating with M80, representing Microsoft and Windows Azure)

  3. andrej
    Posted November 13, 2009 at 7:23 pm | Permalink

    3 things i expect to have huge impact in the future:
    1) internet database – as demonstrated by yql+rest+linkeddata, you want to mine all the data available on the internet, but soa on rpc principles is too limited, you need a flexible query language, which can be the foundation of internet-BI. Linkeddata is like a view layer on top of database tables, where’s the query langauge (cloud query engine) that allows you to query that?
    2) sketch interaction with computers – all input is too strict these days, but touch and tables are leading the way to sketch input. something like i-love-sketch would also be perfect for setting up presentations. Just sketch some slides, use touch to reorder, draw the graphics and have a computer program render your photos (as demonstrated by some research recently). we need the brainstorm freedom of whiteboards in computer interfaces. wall sized multitouch screens would be a good start.
    3) always internet connected using mobile devices. Mobile will be more important than laptop/desktop. (the attack always comes from below: unix replaced mainframe, desktop replaced workstation, laptop replaced desktop. next: mobile replaces laptop)

  4. JasonM80
    Posted November 13, 2009 at 7:46 pm | Permalink

    Great blog post! Very thoughtful and an interesting read. I am interested in your prediction for cloud computing, when you suggest “I expect IaaS to remain more popular than PaaS for 2010.” Is your rationale based mostly on the proliferation of Cloud APIs and the current services available in the marketplace?

    With Amazon.com’s recent moves – introducing a MySQL-compatible RDBMS and an SDK for .NET – it seems like Amazon is moving EC2 in the direction of PaaS. These are likely aimed at competing with Microsoft (Windows Azure) for market share, but it still shows movement in that direction. Also, with the upcoming launch of Microsoft Windows Azure, a true PaaS, and likely a soon-to-be major player in the cloud computing space, PaaS will grow.

    In any case, a lot of your predictions make sense, but, as you say early on in the post, “We’ll see how we did a year from now.”

    (I am collaborating with M80, representing Microsoft and Windows Azure)

  5. James
    Posted November 16, 2009 at 7:58 am | Permalink

    Marketplaces – the links all point to the same presentation. Have you seen http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/ which was launched in April last year?

  6. sogrady
    Posted November 16, 2009 at 6:14 pm | Permalink

    @James: sorry. i swear, every damn link in this thing was broken when i first posted it: no idea why. anyway, they should work now.

    as for the Enterprise Marketplace, i’m not sure i had. thanks for the mention. i’m going to see if i can hunt those guys down for a chat.

  7. hxa7241
    Posted November 17, 2009 at 12:31 pm | Permalink

    Prediction is just fiction without the artistry.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  8. jasonlbaptiste
    Posted November 17, 2009 at 12:46 pm | Permalink

    Ahh the year is almost over. Here come the predictions for 2010 posts that are pure linkbait.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  9. sogrady
    Posted November 17, 2009 at 1:00 pm | Permalink

    I’m frankly surprised that it got linked to at all, actually.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  10. WilliamLP
    Posted November 17, 2009 at 1:12 pm | Permalink

    > a.) might lend themselves well to cloud and cloud-like environments and b.) are receiving disproportionately more attention relative to their erstwhile competition are Clojure and Go.This one is easy. Lisp is going absolutely nowhere beyond appealing to curious mathematically-minded undergrads and researchers. Pure functional ideas and Lisp have been supposed to make a big comeback for what, 20-30 years? The generation that learned CS through SICP in their first year of university have utterly rejected Lisp as a practical production language. Now the generation that is learning with Python and Java is going to think it’s the great new thing?

    Go is "going" nowhere soon, since:

    1. The performance isn’t nearly good enough yet. It’s going to need to be better than languages like Java and C# to even have a plausible niche.

    2. No exceptions and generics right now is an absolute show-stopper for essentially all potential users, purely and simply.

    3. For the spaces that C currently occupies, C works just fine.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  11. roc
    Posted November 17, 2009 at 1:28 pm | Permalink

    I think Go is going to find a home with network services that need better parallel processing than is generally managed with C.Sure, it’ll probably still be a science project next year. But I don’t think it’s as dire as you’re suggesting.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  12. bruin4tw
    Posted November 17, 2009 at 1:51 pm | Permalink

    my random prediction Crunch pad will come out but will soon be put out of biz by the APPLE TABLET

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  13. sogrady
    Posted November 17, 2009 at 2:32 pm | Permalink

    You could be right on both counts. Obviously.Still, I do think it’s at least plausible that significant changes in environmental context might lead to different adoption and uptake patterns. Languages not excepted.

    Witness the revitalization – relatively speaking – of Erlang as the market fetishized scale-out at the expense of scale up.

    The specific criticisms, I think we mostly agree on. I might nitpick on the performance question or the idea that C works fine with respect to Go or the outright dismissal of Lisp dialects, but they’re arguable at worst.

    That said, I think the trend, and history, both point to the addition of new languages to the toolkit. These seemed like pretty reasonable guesses based on the current intelligence, but maybe your objections are – as you argue – simply insurmountable.

    I’ll be interested to see what happens next year.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  14. tybris
    Posted November 17, 2009 at 2:41 pm | Permalink

    The one thing I know about the future is that the predictions are wrong.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  15. fnid
    Posted November 17, 2009 at 2:43 pm | Permalink

    A lot of the comments are bashing predictions as fiction, linkbait, etc, but I like predictions. They are the only way to really measure the vision of an individual. Perhaps not the only way, but a good way. I takes understanding, imagination, realism. Science fiction writers are not only lauded by the imagination of their stories, but the plausibility.I personally like making predictions. That’s what our industry is all about. That’s what science is all about. Predicting the future.

    That said, I don’t see anything particularly insightful in the predictions made in the linked article.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  16. sogrady
    Posted November 17, 2009 at 4:53 pm | Permalink

    Because I’m told it’s not obvious, I am the author of the originally linked piece. Just to ensure full disclosure.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  17. DCS
    Posted November 19, 2009 at 2:19 pm | Permalink

    “…and data marketplaces may ultimately eclipse them all.”

    Interesting thought, but with so much data already available across the web for free — via whitepapers, “slices” from analyst reports published on blogs, etc. — how would you envision this working? Value-added via aggregation and organization? Vertical focus? Single datasets (vs. detailed notes/reports) on the cheap?

  18. ianxm
    Posted November 19, 2009 at 9:16 pm | Permalink

    I think you misunderstood kant’s categorical imperative. if each company implements its interface in the way it feels every company should implement their interface, then they are acting in accordance with kant. kant doesn’t say that they have to get together and create a standard interface.

  19. sogrady
    Posted November 20, 2009 at 9:49 am | Permalink

    @ianxm: respectfully disagree. if highly differentiated APIs are the “universal law,” as kant might put it, customers have a serious problem on their hands.

  20. Ryan
    Posted December 23, 2009 at 2:36 pm | Permalink

    Michael,
    Great predictions for 2010. Appistry (client) is compiling all the cloud predictions for 2010 from around the web here: <A HREF=http://bit.ly/89LHhw.

    I’ll get these added to the list; come check them out and jump in the conversation. Happy holidays!

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