Predictions 2010 [Technology]

2010 will be the Year of Tech. Let’s have a quick look at what’s coming our way in Tech — bigger Better Stronger.

Internet: Worldwide Speed upgrades will up trend, average speed of internet worldwide will rise by 20% and become cheaper. Web applications would grow in number and capability. Mobile Internet usage will increase by 25-35%.

Browsers: Internet browsers see four super powers: Firefox 4 vs. Chrome 5, vs. Opera 10.5 and IE9 rising from ashes. Firefox gains majority of the market, IE follows.

VoIP: Google voice integrated with Gizmo5 make new things possible. Skype will give Google voice head-to-head competition when both of them enter the same territory.

User Interface: HTML 5, Flash, Silverlight: We will see some serious improvements in User Interface with Flash 10.1 and Silverlight going big on the Internet.  HTML 5 will mature and we would see more usage in Blogs, websites, portals making the UI even more powerful. All three will enter mobile market making the Mobile Web interface equally intuitive and capable.

Cloud Computing: Few of the Cloud computing ideas like Windows Azure, Google App Engine get large number of adoption.  Idea of Cloud Gaming On-demand takes momentum. Few cloud apps, services die for good.

Social Media: 2009 was year of rise of Social Media with large adoption of Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook: Facebook would double in 2010, get new UI, but will continue to struggle on Privacy issues as Zuckerberg tries to Open up facebook fight Twitter.

Twitter: Twitter adoption would be more amplified, primarily on the mobile. 2009 was year of micro-blogging, 2010 will become year mobile journalism, social news. Twitter will see new innovations that would make it more maintainable, business friendly. And Twitter finds new ways to earn apart from Realtime search deals with Google and Bing.
Other smaller social networks will lose independent identity, will combine with bigger ones.

Entertainment: BluRay is the defacto standard for movie. 3D television makes way to consumer homes. Few TV broadcasts go 3D HighDef. OLED TVs rise and compete LED, LCD with higher priced, thinner screens. HD Radios broadcast start on local stations, True HD audio comes to music. Most cellphones get 720p HD video recording.

Gaming: New Direct X 11 games arrive Making Windows the best platform for Gaming; PS3 and Xbox 360 follow. Cloud based Gaming on-demand rises in U.S., finds its way to other regions of the world.

Search Engines: Yahoo will continue to decline, struggle to get fractions of share. Bing on the other hand will acquire more smaller search companies and will continue the same ratio. Google will snatch share from Bing and other smaller competitors. Goole will get faster with Caffeine and hence have capacity of indexing upto 50% more pages than it does today in the same amount of time, making the world’s largest search engine, even bigger.

Operating Systems: Windows 7 will continue to grow, however, Mac OS will stay stable. But taking into account Mac OS X from iPhone, iPod Touch, Tablet, it will grow by a significant number.  Snow Leopard will become a start of the Art OS. Most Unix/Linux Operating systems will stay at the same level. Few XP users will migrate to Ubuntu instead of Windows 7.  Solaris could see some serious adoption in the corporate world after Oracle-Sun hardware deal. On Mobile side, Symbian will see end-of-life, WinMo, Blackberry, Palm OS will decrease by a significant number, however, Android will deepen its roots into smartphone industry.

Open Source: Open Source will continue to grow as economy recovers. Open Source Projects would become more powerful, competitive.

Gadgets: 2010 is overwhelmed with Gadgets. We will finally see a Tablet, a MID, a True Multipurpose Phone.

Phones: Google’s dream on Nexus One get little appreciation, adoption. However, with 50+ android launching in 2010, Android will capture 30% of the smartphone market. iPhone 4G will set a new bar for others to follow. Windows Mobile 6.5 becomes a story of the past, declines heavily.

Notebooks/ Tablet: Nothing in particular here, Netbooks, Notebooks will become thinner, lighter and more powerful replacing most desktops. 2010 is year of Tablets. Apple iTablet will set a standard for other to mimic. Nvidia Tegra platform and several similar others demonstrate True power with mobility.

Fate of Tech Giants

Microsoft: 2009 was average for Microsoft with only good thing coming out was Windows 7. 2010 as predicted by most, could be worst. With Windows Mobile 7 getting delayed, again, Microsoft loses hold on Mobile industry. Zune will struggle to grow with some serious competition from Apple. Bing, as already discussed will not do anything exciting. IE9 will give the falling Internet Explorer some oxygen until Firefox, chrome

Google: Google will continue to innovate in Open Source and new Web standards making the dream of Chrome Os truly practical by speeding up the web, web applications and making them more powerful. Google Wave will makeup its lost pride. Android, as discussed, will bring good things to google becoming the second most popular smartphone OS after iPhone. Google will finally think about making Google Phone 2 ,which would be truly competitive on price and features funded by ads.

Apple: Last 3 years had been good for Apple, thanks to Steve Jobs.With good innovations coming on iTablet and iPhone 4G, apple will continue to grow. WWDC 2010 becomes the most hyped and awaited event of the year.

IBM: IBM, the hardware/software giant will see a stable trend gaining more from software services than from hardware.

Oracle/ Sun: The Biggest Tech Deal of the 2009 will fianlly see a merger in early 2010. The merger will be followed by Oracle stepping into hardware space packaged with Software for ERP, Telecom, etc. Oracle had good gain in  2009, 2010 would be a lot better.

Cisco: The Networking Giant will step into Serious 4G LTE networks, beating Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens in the Telecom sector. Juniper and Huawei will continue to challenge Cisco with innovations specially in Routing, Switching and Video. Cisco will pioneer in video and step into new sectors: virtualization, search engines, Hardware in course of time.

Join us while we walk into 2010: