Mark's technology predictions for the new year: 2010

[mark.tomlinson]

Although this is my first public publishing of my technology predictions for the new year, I have always been a person who likes to imagine that I have some magical intuition about the future of technology. At the same time my experience as a performance tester has taught me: with technology, all that glitters (happy-shiny-new-toys) isn't gold. Here are my almost always 100% accurate completely intuitive top ten predictions for technology in the year 2010.

1. Rich Clients (AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, HTML5) hit the BIG TIME! It's not just a developers preference anymore, since more and more customers are making corporate policies to standardize on at least a few (if not a single) web technology platforms. Standardization will accelerate adoption.

2. Cloud Computing will be so ubiquitous, we will start calling it Blue Sky Computing. Everyone will catch some "nice rays" from Google, Amazon and Microsoft. More than predicted, the cost-benefit of distributed computing off-premise will surprise us.

3. Web 3.0 will emerge from the ambiguous depths of technocracy - at least, someone will have to actually build something cool for a thesis to graduate this year, eh?

4. Application teams will start to learn that all the time savings and complexity reduction for developers have really just passed the costs on to testing teams, the business, the infrastructure, more hardware and other people's budgets.

5. Open Source will continue to creep like ivy, fertilized by naivety. Several major companies will learn that the total cost of ownership means the vines finally cover the windows, doors and eventually the whole house.

6. Clifford Stoll will again NOT be proven right about the collapse of the internet, because engineers are inventing the next generation of switches, routers, storage, cpu and wasteless architectures that don't clog the pipes.

7. The only jobs for Data Center Operations will be somewhere near a massive hydro-electric or geo-thermal power source. Which means fishing, white-water rafting and geology fanatics have a new career path...in dead server recycling.

8. Larry will stop buying companies. Maybe.

9. In all types of testing, Resource Visibility and Performance Awareness will become the predictors for determining the likelyhood of success. If you know it's gonna be slow...it will not go!

10. (just a prediction)...I have a hunch some really awesome new features are coming in LoadRunner and Performance Center this year.

Good luck and Happy New Year!

http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/loadrunner/archive/2010/02/04/mark-s-technology-predictions-for-the-new-year-2010.aspx