My Predictions for 2006
Posted on 2006-01-06 at 11:32
The new year is upon us and with it a plethora of experts predicting the fate of their respective industries for the coming year. Rather than insult the experts, I'll submit to tradition and offer my own thoughts on what I expect to see this year for the software industry. Here are five specific predictions I have about the coming year.
1. Linux will master multimedia and thereby gain a new enemy---the multimedia content industry.
I expect that during this year, we'll see linux begin to make its audio/video experience simpler and more comprehensive. The Linux multimedia experience will surpass the Windows and Apple multimedia experiences in ease of use and in breadth of coverage. With it will come legal issues related to Digital Rights Management.
2. Linux will lose server market share to Windows
The latest offering from Microsoft greatly improves the stability and therefore reliability of Windows' Server Edition. All this is done without sacrificing ease-of-use for the admin tools. I hope I'm wrong, but I think this will negatively impact linux server market share in the short term. In the long term (ie, after htis year) I see this is a non issue. The benefits of linux are too great to ignore permanently.
3. Linux will gain desktop market share at Window's expense.
This one is a bit to obvious, since that has been happening at a steady rate for years, so to make it interesting, I will offer a concrete number: 5%. Linux will take 5% of the desktop market by year's end. This will mean that it surpasses Apple (unless Apple also grabs a greater share, which is outside the scope of this prediction). This increased marketshare will not be at Apple's expense, but rather at Microsoft Window's expense. In short, the long predicted "Year of the Linux Desktop" is, in some sense, upon us. Other's have predictied this in th epast and been wrong. This is the first time I'm predicting this. I, of course, will be right.
4. Home Servers will become the new thing to have.
Long a staple of the geek's home, home servers---serving up music and movies and more---will start to take hold in the general populace. By year's end, I predict that the youth market will be on board with this trend, looking for ways to store, access, and share their growing collection of digital miscellany. I'm not sure it will happen byu year's end, but soon enough the market will respond with appliance server devices similar to those on the market now for file and printer sharing. these new appliances will do much more than server files and printers to requesting computers. They will offer the ability to playback music and video, share printers, trade files with remote friends, serve web sites, and more.
5. Apple will enter Tivo's market
Apple will release a hardware solution (not just a software solution, which they already have) that will compete head-to-head with Tivo. Apple will, by consequence, begin moving itself more into the role of entertainment computing and away from professional computing. They will still offer professional enterprise solutions, but they will come to be known as the vendor for the entertainment market, just as they used to be known as the vendor for the graphics market. Specifically, I think Apple will embrace this new conception of themselves. Unlike the graphics market, the entertainment market is all but limitless. They can, and will, make a killing by playing to this.
6. Chairman Bill Gates will download himself into a computer and Google will drop him from the cache
I know I said I'd offer predictions, but I'm throwing this one in for free. Mark my words, Bill Gates will transfer his being into the cyber-ether and Google will in an act of techno-violence remove him from their cache. Many will decry the actions of Google as evil, but punishment will be softer than the public rhetoric. Life will go on.
Consequences
If any one of my above predictions are wrong, even number six, I will eat my hat, provided that I can find a chocolate hat by December 31st of this new year.