Technology Predictions for 2010

• Posted by SondreB on December 28, 2009
• 662 comments
• 

As we enter a new decade, one which will be called The Tens or Twenty Tens, we are ready to a fresh start on a new decade. One which will bring huge important developments in all areas where human kind puts it’s efforts and energy.

Let me first give a general introduction to what others have predicted for this decade, which is one of the favorite decades for many books and Hollywood movies. Then I will give my own predictions for this decade and what will happen in the year 2010. At the end, I will summarize my predictions for 2008 and 2009 and see what I got right or wrong.

The Tens

As 2001: A Space Odyssey was instrumental for the previous decade; The Aughties, there is another film adaptation for the second book in the series by Arthur C. Clarke. 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a movie which is largely set on the context of the Cold War between USA and Soviet Union. While Russia (previously Soviet Union) is not on-par with it’s previous empire, they will be an important partner in the global society, for both environmental and technological reasons.

Other movies that depicts The Tens are: Terminator Salvation, Blade Runner, Akira, I Am Legend, Back to the Future Part II, 2012, The Island and with games such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 1 and 2, Metal Gear Solid 4 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (which happen to occur in Chernobyl).

A lot of movie and game predictions for The Tens evolve around misery of all forms: World Wars, famine, terror, death and global disasters from natural disasters, the creation of intelligent machines and whatnot. I predict that very little of the movies and games mentioned above will come true ;-)

Decade of Subscriptions

My main major prediction for The Tens is that it will represents a dramatic shift towards subscription based models for everything. This isn't exactly a revolutionary prediction, as almost everything today is already based around subscriptions. There are some few industries which stills holds true to the concept of charging pr. item, these will fail in The Tens unless they are willing to change. We can’t truly say that the previous decade had subscription models for everything, cause in many instances it was only available and restricted to certain parts of the globe. Microsoft’s Zune Pass, subscription to the (almost) entire music library on Zune, available to subscribers only in the USA. Spotify, another similar service, an innovation from Sweden, is still only available to a few selected countries. My prediction is that the subscription model will become more global, span country borders and become available to anyone, anytime, from anywhere – from any status in society.

Those who make it big in The Tens, are those early out with good subscription-based services. If we see to Amazon and their newly released (internationally) Kindle – which was the most gifted item on Amazon.com ever and the increase in sales of digital eBooks, we see that people are ready for a change in an area which for long have been held off due to lack in innovation on the reading devices and the usability and experience of delivery. Anyone can use the Kindle and buy new books with ease from the chair, bed, taxi or bus you’re currently at. Amazon Kindle books are today packed with copy protection and all the items you purchase are not yours, you only pay for a license to the item. There are two issues with this, the first one with copy protection (DRM) is one that hopefully will go away, in the same manner as Apple iTunes stopped protecting the music they sold. The other issue with consumers not actually being able to purchase a product, will be a major hurdle going forward. We will see lawsuits and protests against the players in this field. It’s important for us as consumers to realize that our rights are virtually none when it comes to digital content purchases. We need to demand our rights to the digital products in the same manner as we have with physical products. When I purchase a physical CD album or a book, this is something I can later on sell, rent or give away to a friend, relative or can be inherited by my (future) children. With digital content, this is not legal or physically possible. Amazon has another big problem that the costs of eBooks are not worth the dramatic reduction is usage rights and value for money. I’ve seen countless examples of books which are cheaper in paperback than eBook, this will hopefully change moving forward.

We consume more content than we ever did before and none is able to pay for every piece of song, movie or TV-serie episode they watch. Which is why many still listen to radios and watch television. I’d really like to see a television which charges pr. watched episode of reruns of Friends and Seinfeld. I pay a relatively small price (less than one CD) every month for access to the full music library on Spotify and I can listen to my favorite playlists on all my computers and my mobile phone. I don’t have to care about the hassle with synchronization of content and connecting cables to the computer.

From my 2009 predictions, here is one that became a widespread reality for many:

Legal methods of video distribution will have similar appeal as Spotify and will have a good chance of competing against less-legal ways of distribution, which by all counts today represents a big deal of the video distribution market. I’m currently a beta-tester for a coming video-subscription service called Voddler, another innovation from Sweden, and the potential is great.

Here is my wish list:

• Amazon Kindle Subscription, read any book you want in the entire library for $9.99 a month. Download copies without restrictions for $2.99.
• Zune Pass International, Microsoft is planning international release of Zune in 2010, let’s hope it happens. Until then, I’m more than happy with Spotify.
• Movie Subscriptions, services such as Voddler and others will become more widespread. Television sets will include support for streaming videos over the Internet.
• YouTube Premium, pr. movie cost and/or subscription model for premium content delivered by YouTube. This will work on most of today’s TV set which supports YouTube.

This chapter had focus on media content, but the same is true for everything in the free market. Including computer-rental (through Cloud Computing models), robot-rental (this will be huge), car-rental (inner-city electrical vehicles).

What is the potential for a subscription provider? Massive amount of customers. The last 20 years brought 1 billion users to the Internet, the next 5 years will bring another billion users to the Internet. Think about that!

Decade of Simplicity

Another big area of development will be towards simplicity, in all it’s forms and shapes. While the previous decade had a lot of focus on functionality and features, the next decade will have focus on streamlining existing functionality and features – into simple and intuitive consumer solutions.

At the end of the decade, mobile phones had more features than users knew what to do with. Microsoft Word had more functions that any single human could learn about. This spawned new products, such as the Apple iPhone, the new Ribbon-bar in Microsoft Office 2007 and Twitter, micro-blogging service. These developments will in the 2010s spawn of new services and products, where the focus is on building simple and user-friendly solutions.

2010

For the next year we will see a smooth progress in all areas of technology. As our computing power and abstraction models have become more advanced and established, we are more fit for an continued evolution of progress in all areas of research and development.

Computers will have six and possibly 8-core CPUs, most computers will come standard with minimum 4GB RAM at the end of 2010. We will see the first demos of Windows “8”. Visual Studio 2010 will be released, which will further improve developer productivity and team collaboration. More software projects will succeed than ever before in recorded history, thanks to improved practices, tools and patterns. Cloud Computing will give us an additional abstraction layer that makes it faster and easier to build online services that can scale to millions of users.

Avatar made movie-history in the end of 2009, with it’s innovative use of 3D. It will spawn an era of a lot of crappy and some good 3D movies. Hollywood will yet again make record numbers in 2010, though this is in some ways the last year of growth if they can’t move to an online distribution model that can compete with “free” alternatives.

We’ll get news about the next-generation gaming consoles from Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony. HALO: Reach will be played by a record number of simulations online gamers, beating the previous record set in 2009 by Modern Warfare 2.

Microsoft will release more online services which are only available to individuals in the USA. They will release at least one new software product which is completely unknown to the public before announced. Big things will happen with Windows Live Services, details will probably be known during MIX10 conference. Apple will release an incredible, amazing, awesome tablet computing device. Google will continue to develop Google Wave and their OS will be largely ignored by the market as there are better alternatives already available for instant-on OS-experiences.

Software that previously was restricted to local installation and desktop will be built using Silverlight and use online cloud storage to persist data in a secure and scalable manner. All your documents, books, music and other content will be stored in the cloud, except from movies. Movies will come later, as the capacity of network bandwidth and storage becomes cheaper.

One new and important service in the online cloud world is Boks, it’s a service that helps you organize all your stuff (books, movies, games, CDs, etc.). It will  be available in 2010 and is developed by me: http://www.intheboks.com/

Previous Predictions

In 2008 (Technology in 2008 and Beyond) I focused on more general predictions, problems with the global warming, the free markets inability to innovative in face of regulations and that the CPU will continue according to Moore’s Law. Other predictions I made in 2008 came true for many, the ever increasing social networking services and our tendency to be drawn into them. Facebook, Twitter and blogging is still growing in popularity and the trend will continue. We have become accustomed to spending more time online and our need for content is growing. Watching videos on YouTube is the new way we entertain ourselves and friends (watching videos in the living room on the big TV), educate ourselves, involves ourselves in debates and discussions and it’s the way we communicate our thoughts, ideas, opinions and imaginations.

In 2009 (Technology Prediction for 2009) I tried to be more concrete with my predictions and one of the major ones was of course social networks, which have more or less come true. Social networks are today an important part of the global society. I predicted laptops with 16 and 32GB RAM, today you can buy an Dell M6500 with 16GB RAM and Quad Core CPU.

Another prediction I made was $199 netbook, which happened in November. You could get an Acer Aspire One with 160GB HDD, 1GB RAM, wireless network, webcam and more for $199.

Microsoft had a very successful release of Windows 7, computer security is still a major problem. Phishing was big in 2009 as I predicted, with millions of usernames and passwords lost for services such as Google GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo. Cloud Computing is off to a relatively slow start, those who’s willing to bet on the cloud are having success and more will come in 2010.

We have not seen the development in emotional software as I predicted, thought I’m confident that this will become a very important industry in the The Tens.

To read more predictions for 2010, check out my fellow Microsoft Regional Directors at TheRegion.com.

(Photo by Tim in Sydney)