Rubbing the Crystal Ball: 5 Technology Predictions for 2007

Tuesday, December 19, 2006 10:13 PM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: News | Comments: 8 | View blog reactions

Here are my technology predictions for 2007. Others may follow...

Every technologist should go through with this little exercise of predicting what may happen in the next year. It keeps your skills honed for each year and it shows everyone how "hooked in" you are as a technologist in your career. Besides, its fun to guess the future.

The reason I'm doing this is because Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.net has started a Reviews and Predictions Link-Fest. It's a great opportunity to see everyone's predictions and reviews for what's going to happen next year.

So I figure, what the heck, I might as well put on my swami hat and start gazing (I know...that's an ugly image) :-)

Prediction 1: VoIP products will become more mainstream.

Based on the products and services released by this year's end, I imagine the telecommunications industry is quaking in its boots right now and by the end of the next year, phones won't be purchased with megahertz specifications, but with bandwidth requirements.

Prediction 2: Google will make a significant purchase in 2007.

I'm not talking about another small company acquisition, I'm talking a full-blown Yahoo! or some other big name company. One things for sure, once Google is on a roll, you can't stop the momentum. Google will shock people again as they did in 2006 with YouTube!

Prediction 3: Mobility will become more of a necessity.

I might as well jump on the bandwagon with this one. I've been hearing this for the last 3 years and every year, it always seems to gain more and more steam. One of these years, it will simply explode...and I'm predicting that will happen next year.

Prediction 4: .NET 3.0 won't catch on until 2008.

I know of a lot of companies that aren't even touching .NET 2.0 yet, let alone looking at 3.0. I understand that Windows Vista is coming out, but do they need to include .NET in their release. Slow down, man!

If companies decide to move to a newer version of .NET, they will probably move to 2.0. My reasoning for this is because there are a vast number of features from 1.1 to 2.0 and judging by the feature set in 3.0, it may seem overwhelming to developers and they may apply clunky 1.1 techniques to a svelt 3.0, which would cause some interesting programming practices without proper training.

Prediction 5: Firefox will obtain a 30% market share.

The Open Source browser will continue to gain on IE. With even more quality extensions built every day and Firefox 3.0 on the horizon, the browser battle will be quite a fight to witness.

Since this is my first year predicting, I think I'll stick with a small list for this year.

Anybody have any other predictions?

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Chatterbox - 8 Comments

1.  mincus on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 5:33 AM said:

Great Predictions mate ...i am also eager to see whether Google does make a big purchase or not ..


Great Blog ....m subscribing to it ..


 

2.  Geoff Young on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 7:08 AM said:

yeah, number 3 will be interesting to follow in 2007...


http://joshmaher.wordpress.com/2006/12/18/2007-prediction-blogs-will-be-replaced/


 

3.  John on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 10:21 AM said:

I sure hope to see more Firefox users and less IE users next year ;).

4.  tigerfish on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 1:05 PM said:

I got tired of making technology predictions in my last job. But your predictions are a great-read!
Sure beat those Wall-Street predictions, manz!
I like it!

<a href="http://teczcape.blogspot.com/2006/12/star-wars-vs-stark-wok-jedi-to-make.html">May the Force be with you, the Blo-gedi way</a>

5.  Laurie on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 4:47 PM said:

Dot net 3.0 wont catch by 2008 agreed on that.Here people are still switching to 2.0.But the linq technology in 3.0 will rock.It has some of the major thing which java has.Use of annatations!!!

Google will have to buy.They have started getting a lot of competiiotn.Like in india Guruji.com which is an indian search engine has precited to beat google in india by next year.you can read about it on my post here

http://www.technospot.net/blogs/index.php/2006/12/09/guruji-challenges-to-beat-google-in-india/

Great Post

I also got entry in darrens project.
http://technospot.net/blogs/index.php/2006/12/19/predicting-the-evolution-of-techspot-insideout/

And i am feeding your blog.There wont be another chance to meet so many bloggers

6.  Coopz on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 4:56 PM said:

and here is the reason that Darren's writing project works so well. I am so putting you in my favourites.
I would also so that I agree with all your predictions.
My writing project submission is <a href="http://www.4wdadventureforum.com/blog/2006/12/when-gps-goes-bad.html">here</a>

7.  Howard V. Miller on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 7:43 PM said:

Nice list, and nice predictions.  I definitely agree with Google's purchases and VOIP .I can only hope firefox gains 30%.  btw, your comment form shows up a little funny in my firefox ;)

8.  Jennifer Lynn on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 10:08 PM said:

Interesting predictions there, sir. Firefox will probably make a name for itself more this coming year. I can always tell which sites use Firefox by their setup. If IE wasn't the dominant browser still, I'd switch in a heartbeat. (I think Firefox has much better features)

 

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