I’m setting myself up, but I’m going to make some 2006 predictions. It will be four quarters before I have to eat my hat, so I feel safe for now :-) Deep breath. Here goes.
Web Nation
Web 2.0 — VCs will start asking tougther questions and grow less impressed with user generated content aggregating feed-enabled Web 2.0 startups. There’s still a lot of promise and innovation, but the catchphrase is waning of, and we’ll start paying attention to more specialized uses.
Software as a Service — You can pretty much predict the growth rate for outsources services in the corporate world. But the biggest buzz would come from a different customer base: the company of one and the Fortune 500,000. Simple, cheap and accessible, more people would be using services that have long been the domain of corporate America.
Podcasting — We’re going to see the emergence of the podcoach, who provides training and consulting in making more effective podcasts. The customer base will consist mostly of celebrities and executives who find the new medium “promising” and “cool”. The year of the podcasting CEO will result in phrases such as “didn’t you hear the memo?” and “where’s my iPod spam filter?”.
Web feed groups — With prominent VCs to back it up, a new startup will enter the “Web group feed” market. The service would allow users to create and moderate community feeds that aggregate individual feeds, allow users to find group feeds based on common interest or affinity, and allow the group to share ad revenues between its members.
Search — At least one leading search vendors will open up their search index API, allowing anyone to access the index without the cost of a crawling infrastructure and create vertical searches. On the other hand, the annoyance list will include splogs, SEOs and “paid placement”, further degrading search relevancey.
CRM for the masses — A Web-based CRM service that offers basic functionality, costs little, and integrates with GMail, del.icio.us and Flickr, targeting the company of one and the Fortune 500,000. I’m betting 37signals will be one of the key players.
Federated SaaS — The killer mashup would aggregate several small services into a single package with centarlized access control and a single invoice. It will be easier to manage for small businesses, and offer lower price points. Expect the online office of tomorrow to be a federation of services from several best-of-breed companies, and to go beyond word processing and spreadsheets and offer online storage, project management and tracking, accounting and billing, CRM and collaboration.
GYM and friends
Yahoo — In a predictable cycle Yahoo will continue to impress us with cool new services and killer acquisitions, bore us with predictable Google feature clones, and annoy us with more banner ads and worse content policies. But by year end, more sneezers will find themselves using search.yahoo.com to Google stuff.
Google — And speaking of Google, expect an earfull of talks about Google’s fall from grace, attacks on the quality of its search results and “do no evil” policy, disappointment with AdSense ROI and pricing, and (premature) speculation that Google is heading the way of Netscape. With so many eyes watching, every tumble looks like a fall.
Microsoft — Windows Live will under impress, but MS will get the user base it wants by moving MSN users over. Vista and Office 12 will over impress with sleek UI and cool new features, but will disappoint at the box office.
Amazon — Too many options, I just can’t pick which one will be completed by year end: video rental, music download, services marketplace, location-based searches, auctions, and lightweight blogging for its sellers and top reviewers.
eBay — I’m not going to predict 2006 will be the year eBay starts questioning “Skype? WTF were we thinking!”. But someone will prove it’s possible to recreate the reputation economy outside their walled gardens and start undermining the eBay model.
AOL — AOL will move from ICU to the recovery room. We may see some positive thought change, but not enough meeting time to do anything about it in 2006.
Programming
Ruby — Ruby will make inroads into the enterprise space. As with anything to do with enterprises, the road will be paved with meetings, memos and upselling vendors. It will be slow, but I’m betting it will top Java’s growth in the formative years. What’s different this time? Blogs make it easier to spread new ideas, are better knowledge bases, and substitute for support calls.
Java — With IBM putting its weight behind the LAMP stack, BEA will formally announce support for at least one dynamic language, most likely a JVM-friendly one. Seeing the decline in mindshare, Sun will finally talk openly about open sourcing Java and allowing the community to extend the language and core library.
.Net — Microsoft’s Net 2.0 framework will be 3.0 quality, but it will find itself competing with a stronger LAMP stack and the Mozilla platform (aka XULRunner).
JavaScript — Beyond AJAX, JavaScript will finally mature into a usable language owing to a new breed of libraries and frameworks. A handful of startups will offer tools for building JavaScript without coding JavaScript, but none will make a dent in the marketplace.
Software Architecture
WS-Complexity — The WS-* stack will become the major adoption story, and just as quickly transform into the major disappointment story of 2006. Although barely complete, it will find itself the incumbent, fighting against Lightweight Web Services that are built on REST, SSL, JSON and CoC.
CoC — Speaking of, CoC (Convention over Configuration) is the new IoC (Inversion of Control). Expect every major language to have an open source CoC framework project launched in 2006.
Enterprise Computing — Enterprise Computing will become synonymous with complex, legacy code, the 21st century version of COBOL. The new cool thing? Web computing.
Shared Nothing Architecture — The du jour approach to scalability and reliability, where J2EE and LAMP stand on equal footing.
Labnotes » Blog Archive » Enterprise software is 21st century legacy
