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Software Development Predictions For 2009
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Jan 05, 2009 05:25 AM
from the hand-writing-on-the-wall dept.
from the hand-writing-on-the-wall dept.
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister lays out his development predictions for 2009. These include further struggles from Microsoft in retooling its image, a more open source mindset for Java, twilight for Sun, the Web as platform of choice, and a dearth of innovation due to dwindling economic prospects. 'When customers aren't buying, tool vendors don't innovate — so don't expect many groundbreaking new technologies to debut this year,' McAllister writes, adding that smart companies will realize that 'process automation is one of the best ways to reduce costs in any business,' making 2009 the ideal time to 'revisit old software schemes that got shelved back when staffing budgets were flush.'"
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On the contrary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:On the contrary (Score:5, Insightful)
thats assuming the rotten trees get burned and leave space for fresh younglings
in our case the rotten trees got bailed out
Parent
Re:On the contrary (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry but I cant think of a single company/brand/product that had its origins in the Great Depression.
Up till 2002 the software industry was counter-cyclic with the rest of the economy. When times got tough companies spent more on computers and associated software to save costs or gain competetive edge.
But the low hanging fruit is gone and IT departments are just another big budget item that needs cutting. Particularly in the current cluster f***ed economy -- can you think of any software that would get you easier, indeed any, credit from the bank, or, software that would help you sell your latest high tech gizmo to someone who just lost thier job and is having thier mortgage foreclosed?
Spending on sex, gambling and drugs goes up in hard times, but, the first two are a done deal as far a software is concerned and the third is in a market so free that the competition will kill you.
Parent
Re:On the contrary (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether they will or not, is another matter - I suspect it's much more likely that they're going to keep their heads down, and work to 'lowest common denominator' IT services.
Parent
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It won't provide any dividends now. It might in the future. It will cost money now.
You may not have got the memo, but most businesses are short of money right now.
Re:On the contrary (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry but I cant think of a single company/brand/product that had its origins in the Great Depression.
Hewlett-Packard is one.
Spending on sex, gambling and drugs goes up in hard times, but, the first two are a done deal as far a software is concerned and the third is in a market so free that the competition will kill you.
Apparently, people also still tend to buy video games, lucky for me. Naturally, no industry is *completely* free of belt-tightening, but among my circle of friends and colleagues, the market appears to be reasonably stable.
You also have to keep in mind that *most* people, even in this economy, are employed and still doing well. The US unemployment rate is at,what, around 6.7 percent or so, or about one in every fifteen people? Around 4 percent of the country is ALWAYS employed, generally due to some chronic issue (can't or won't work for some reason) or just due to normal between-job transitions. It sounds about right - I've been unemployed for about 5 percent of my career. It doesn't take much - a six month stretch in an otherwise employed 10 year career.
The economy slows down not necessarily when people are in dire straits, but when they reign in their spending for fear their job may be next on the cutting block. Expenses may go up a bit, the belts get a bit tighter, which propagates to others. But even in good times, businesses try not to spend money frivolously anyhow. Besides, there are always going to be businesses and people that are surviving, even thriving during these times.
But the low hanging fruit is gone and IT departments are just another big budget item that needs cutting. Particularly in the current cluster f***ed economy -- can you think of any software that would get you easier, indeed any, credit from the bank, or, software that would help you sell your latest high tech gizmo to someone who just lost thier job and is having thier mortgage foreclosed?
What makes software and IT so special that it can be cut before everything else? Businesses of all types and sizes are more reliant on computers than ever before, and those needs don't disappear during a slow economy. Sure, you won't see an orgy of tech spending like during dot-com booms, but no company in their right minds would just axe their IT department any more than they'd eliminate their accounting department.
Spending on sex, gambling and drugs goes up in hard times, but, the first two are a done deal as far a software is concerned and the third is in a market so free that the competition will kill you.
Apparently, people also still tend to buy video games, lucky for me. Naturally, no industry is *completely* free of belt-tightening, but among my circle of friends and colleagues, the market appears to be reasonably stable. And our companies all purchase other software on a regular basis. The economy still works in lean times, just a little more slowly and a little less comfortably.
Parent
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Call the Department of Redundancy Department... copy and paste error. Whoops.
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In hard times companies dont axe thier IT departments they just kill new projects and purchasing. Given the abysmally slow software development cycle for most business projects this actually makes sense -- "I save $100,000 dollars now on something that might work in 2011.".
Its pretty much the same in the consumer market - if you might lose your job next month that cluncky old Dell suddenly looks "good enough" and no new hardware - no new software.
Your probably right about the games industry though!
And it no
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In these hard times companies are also scrapping upgrades and new systems as well. I can;t quite believe it, but MS is (apparently) going to lay off 10% [independent.co.uk] or so of its global workforce. Perhaps they finally realised how many of those microsofties do useful work, or they've decided to get rid of all the Raymond Chens now they only use .NET.
Obviously if revenue is "disappointing", it can only mean companies are not buying more MS stuff, probably because what they have works (though MS is desperate to get everyo
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Yeah, but what isn't?
Re:On the contrary (Score:4, Informative)
The 6.7% figure also doesn't factor people who went from software analyst, machinist, or corporate accountant to janitor, grocery store cashier, or burger flipper. For that matter, it doesn't count people who went from full time at one company to part time at another.
Depending upon the news source you trust, the real unemployment figure in the US is closer to 15%.
Parent
Internet Inflection Point (Score:3, Interesting)
The Internet has entered a long-term inflection point.
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entry=internet_inflection_point_microsoft [realmeme.com]
Network traffic for many major sites began shrinking or slowing in growth 1-2 years ago.
The negative growth in e-commerce sales was not an anomaly.
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But a lot of that is web 2.0 traffic, you can't compare the two. It's like how diesel gets you more miles per gallon. Or something.
Oh, and please buy a new computer, everybody. Pleeeeaaaaaase!
In fact (Score:2)
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They don't start growing until the ashes have cooled down, and I don't think the fire's out yet.
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Let me google that for you... [letmegoogl...foryou.com]. Oh! Here it is!
Prediction (Score:3, Funny)
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Then do something less difficult instead.
Who controls the present controls the future. Who controls the past controls the present.
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Who controls the present controls the future. Who controls the past controls the present.
That's not true at all... or do the Romans still control everything and I just don't know it?
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... and you'll probably use the Roman alphabet for that spelling too.
(At least we don't use their numbering system any more....)
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And still, postdiction of the future is quite harder, as it requires to move the point of reference ahead in time to a point beyond the future. And no matter how far ahead you push that bloody point, it seems to stubornly stay in the future rather than beyond it.
We've since experimented with some very succesful methods of predicting the past; most of which involve burying our predictions in a hole and then taking them out the next week.
Dr. Franhoffer was able to predict last week's lottery first prize numbe
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Actually, prediction is not necessarily difficult. Just interesting prediction is difficult.
Take a normal 6-sided dice. I can precisely predict what you will throw. You will throw a number that is between 1 and 6.
See? It's just not very interesting.
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..and possibly, the MORE interesting it is, the MORE difficult it is. (hmm there may be a Phd buried in that)
2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
Hm. How about this:
(1) The majorty of humanity will carry on buying OEM MS operating systems
(2) Apple will produce something sleek, shiny, and expensive
(3) Linux users will think that 2009 will be when Linux will move (at last) into the mainstream userbase. They will be wrong.
(4) The majority of humanity will carry on using Internet Explorer, which will continue to annoy every web developer who doesn't have a MS qualification.
(5) Sun will trudge on.
(6) Cloud computing will still be used by academics and hackers.
(7) Java will continue to have it's mixture of fans and foes. But not much else.
(8) Same goes for BEA, etc.
(9) Innovation will happen in ways that you least expect.
(10) Oh - that year went by so fast.
(11) But now I am out of a job because the banks took my money and made a profit, then made a loss and took my money again.
Re:2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably most of these will be true, it's hardly surprising that mostly the world continues as it has.
The IE-thing though, I see sligthly differently. It's true that most people use IE. But it is also true that IE has seen a steady decline the last 2 years. Like you, I think the trends will continue much as they are, but that still means a continous downwards trend.
For the websites we run at work (I work for a web-development company that carries the websites of around 1500 norwegian companies, including a dozen of the larger ones) 2 years ago we saw 80% IE on average (more on grandma-type websites, less on technical ones), one year ago it was at about 73%, and now in december it was at 65%.
I don't care much about IE, but I do care about healthy competition. My ideal world would have no single browser above 50%. That's the best guarantee that people will not develop exclusively for ONE browser.
Parent
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One strong-hold of IE has and probably always will be the corporate desktop, simply because it can be configured on the AD from factory install. That means basically that admins can lock it down (No ActiveX, no Javascript on Internet sites, etc) without needing any extra config or installations.
FireFox I know can be managed this way too, but as a general rule, 3rd-party browsers have never had too much support for enterprise manageability from the get-go.
Re:2009 (Score:5, Funny)
(12) Lispers will remain quietly smug. Except Paul Graham, who will be vocally smug. .net is upgraded to another version. Nobody had figured out what the previous version did. /.ers, nobody in the real world cares.
(13) Pythoneers will remain vocally smug, except Guido who is busy doing real work.
(14) Open source software development remain 5 years ahead of Microsofts, except for the GUI, which lags by a decade.
(15) Someone will write a new distributed version control system.
(16) New web frameworks are written in Python (x3), Ruby (x2) and Cobol. Database work is still difficult.
(17)
(18) Scrum get's a new acronym, to the disgust of its advocates.
(19) Outside of a select few programmers and
Parent
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... and I just lost my apostrophe license.
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Oops - you are right. I missed out the word Desktop, even though I was thinking of it when I wrote that
Should read
(3) Linux users will think that 2009 will be when Linux will move (at last) into the mainstream desktop userbase. They will be wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
Money != innovation (Score:2)
'When customers aren't buying, tool vendors don't innovate ...'
Innovation comes from creativity and possibility(time) to implement it. I do not believe you can buy innovation or that the creative minds stop innovate just because it is an economic downturn.
Besides, during the downturns it is usually higher pressure to create new (innovative) products, at least on my workplace.
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"Innovation comes from creativity and possibility(time) to implement it. I do not believe you can buy innovation or that the creative minds stop innovate just because it is an economic downturn."
Add money to the first bit. Innovative minds might not stop due to a downturn, but they may stop being paid, and not all innovative/creative folks are the types to do it in their spare time. A lot are (vis. FOSS), but by no means all.
Innovation is bad times (Score:4, Interesting)
Everything in life has a cost, why look into the minor ones when your rolling in so much cash it doesn't matter? What may happen is that although less money is spent on new research and developement, some of the better products already developed become more widely deployed as people realise they need to do things better.
From a personal perspective I have spent a lot more time looking at my finances in the last 12 months, exactly because as I earn more than I spend I (incorrectly) didn't bother in the past. I'm argueable better off now than last year exactly because of the financial crisis.
For an economy the failure of some ineffective businesses allows others to fill the niche, it encourages people to question suppliers while looking for economies.
None of this makes the recession a good thing, and I'd argue that a lot of our goverment's (in the UK) actions will cause more problems than they solve, but I hope the innovators of the world don't believe that now isn't as good a time as any to find improvements.
Innovation for market creation (Score:3, Insightful)
'When customers aren't buying, tool vendors don't innovate"
Innovation does not only service existing markets, it creates new ones, too. Think about Nintendo (Wii) and Apple (iPhone) for instance, who consistently create new markets that weren't there before. In a stagnating market, innovation is more important than ever.
Exactly (Score:2)
If there are no sales most companies don't sit on their hands and cry, well maybe the really big ones do - to the feds. Smaller ones just start rolling out some new ideas to see if they can drum up a new market. What's not innovative about that?
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'When customers aren't buying, tool vendors don't innovate"
Innovation does not only service existing markets, it creates new ones, too. Think about Nintendo (Wii) and Apple (iPhone) for instance, who consistently create new markets that weren't there before. In a stagnating market, innovation is more important than ever.
Agreed. To put it another way, problems require solutions. Solutions sometimes require innovation.
We're facing problems now where the solutions we've been using aren't cutting it, and are perhaps even the cause of the problems. Therefore, I expect to see a LOT of innovation in the next few years.
I agree. (Score:2, Interesting)
Tightening spending means businesses will be less willing to "experiment" with new ideas.
ASIDE:
On innovative idea that looks doomed is uncensored radio via satellite : Sirius-XM are on the verge of disappearing. A bad economy kills more good ideas than it creates. The arrival of the 1930s Depression eliminated most of the car companies, leaving behind an industry consolidated into just a few juggernauts. Expect the same thing to happen in 2009-2010 for our modern industries.
New Web Server (Score:2)
new ideas will flourish (Score:3, Interesting)
Just not from big companies. He forgot about all the downsized programers that now have the time to work on there own Ideas and projects. Software startups don't need capital just programers with time on there hands.
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there'll be trouble in the middle east.
that's more than 500 deaths in a week. (if you consider population, that would mean 100000 US citizens, so yeah, reaction will come) I foresee another 50 years of 'disagreements'
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You're an optimist.
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You seem to forget this not only is the year of Duke Nukem Forever on Linux but also the year of death of pc gaming.
Which should leave you wondering: how bad will Linux DNF be to single handedly kill pc gaming?
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Quoth the NYT article:
Another good solution to the too-big-to-fail problem is to break up any institution that becomes too big to fail.
Methinks this might be relevant to institutions in other, non-financial realms.