Belated predictions for 2008

Who says all annual predictions have to happen in January? Not I! This blog post got me thinking about how the year will unfold. Here's how I see 2008 playing out (skipping anything that I predicted in December and which happened in January, so as not to stack the deck).

• The iPhone/iTouch SDK will launch a wave of application development. Only a few will be hits/killer apps, although games will be a major area of success, and corporate applications will start to appear.
• With the appearance of corporate connectivity applications and the G2 iPhone having better out-of-box corporate support, the iPhone’s explosive growth will continue.
• The Google Phone platform will fail to gain significant traction in ’08 (maybe in ’09). There is no reference hardware, and there are IP issues of ISVs, as well as issues of how much of the hardware you get access to. Handset manufacturers will be slow to adopt it.
• Apple with ship Bento in iWorks '09. Bento will still suck.
  
• ERP integration consulting will continue to be a major growth area, with SOA and ESB causing project churn. Oracle and IBM will reap huge rewards from it.
• SQL Server 2008 will be a big hit in MSFT environments, and win new business for new application deployment, but will not result in major “switching” from Oracle for established infrastructures.
• Silverlight and Flash will become pervasive, with Flash the clear leader. However, Silverlight will start eating healthily into Flash’s market share after Silverlight 1.1 is released.
• Vista adoption will cease to be an issue in the press as SP1 is a success, and corporate edition starts to “hockey stick” upwards. XP will start to be seen as a legacy platform.
• IE8 will be a major win for Microsoft among developers as MSFT (finally!) shows it understands the importance of adherence to Web standards and pseudo standards for Web developers. IE8 passing the Acid2 test was a watershed.
• Perl 6 will not ship.
• Duke Nukem forever will not ship.
• Classic Doom will still have better playability than many modern games (try it with Zdaemon).
• PHP 6 might ship, but not before Q4.
• RSS will still not be mainstream outside of the tech savvy/early adopter crowd.
• ASP.NET's new MVC architecture will solidify and grow its corporate adoption.
• Lack of interest in Ruby on Rails 2.0 continues. It’s reputation as the way of the future will continue to diminish as its original breakthrough features are copied onto every platform (apart from Perl).
• Alpha’s new v9 product launches will triple company revenue for ’08.
• Amazon's cloud continues to draw third-party management tools. Other vendors take notice. The trend continues, and Amazon's cloud reaches the tipping point that turns it into a compelling platform. By the end of 2008 I think we'll see this market -- or perhaps just Amazon -- crossing the chasm and becoming mainstream.