From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
It’s the time of year when everybody makes predictions and who am I to buck the trend?
It’s actually been an exciting year in technology innovation and I think we’ll see that energy continue in 2007. We’ve got all the new tech we can handle right now, so next year will be more about making choices and assimilating what we’ve got.
Expect virtualization to be a huge topic, with every server maker jumping into the fray. You’ll also begin to see a lot of add-on products that build on virtualization platforms and provide for improved security, management and functionality. This is a hugely disruptive technology. For the first time, the operating system is being disengaged from the hardware, and that has the potential to change things pretty fundamentally This was the year that people got excited about virtualization; 2007 will be the year they figure out how to put it to work.
There’s no question that service-oriented architecture is going mainstream, and in 2007 we will begin to see public demonstrations of very impressive capability. A lot of this new innovation will come from combining internal applications with commercial services. That’s one big reason software as a service (SaaS) is so important. We’ve talked a lot about the ease-of-deployment benefits of SaaS this year, but where it really gets exciting is when you start combining applications from multiple vendors and customizing them through a services interface. We’re in the first inning of the shift to this new software delivery vehicle and I think the game is going to get very interesting next year.
Expect lots of action in mobile automation. There are some big wireless internet deployments in the works – more than 250 municipalities are working on them – and the prospect is there for an explosion of high speed services at little or no cost. This will become even more compelling as corporations make the move to voice over IP and equip their employees with phones that can connect to wireless networks. The cost of hard-wired bandwidth has been plummeting for three years while mobile networking has stayed stubbornly expensive. It’s time for that to change and we’ll all be better for that.
On the desktop, look for the first real signs of some action in Linux. The new distributions are simple and easy to install and use. For many business desktop users, they will work just fine. OpenOffice.org is a kick-butt office suite for the price and a lot of people have recently their first open source experience with Firefox and liked it. I’m not proposing that Microsoft’s franchise is in trouble but users to have a viable alternative to Windows for the first time.
If you read this column regularly, you know I’m fascinated by social media and the impact that personal publishing is having on business and society. There are 100 million people on MySpace already and the service is barely two years old. Forget the first inning, we’re still in the first at-bat of this megatrend. Social media will disrupt many of our institutions and assumptions fundamentally by giving ordinary people something they have never had before: the power to be heard at a global level. I don’t think we can even begin to predict the revolution this will kick off, but I sure want to be around to watch it for a while.
These are fun times to be writing about innovation and I look forward to continuing the conversation into the new year. Next week we’ll set the stage with a discussion of the exciting potential of small technology changes to kick off major disruptions in our institutions. Have a great holiday!