Predictions & Resolutions

The time of the year for predictions started in December, the time of resolutions started a few days ago. Let’s tie those together in this post…Predictions:

•  It will be a great year for Free & Open Source Software. I know it’s been written several times that because of dwindling I.T. budgets resulting from the global crisis money would be less spent on expensive licensing, but I do buy into this theory. However it’s certainly not the only explanation: Free Software gets better, Microsoft is losing its grip on the desktop (yet tries hard to come back with Silverlight and other initiatives), and applications go in the cloud.
• Talking about the cloud, we will see this trend going. But there’s a paradox in this pattern: do not believe that people only need a browser and do not pay attention to their actual desktop. They do, and they want a nice user experience, bells and whistles that do not actually annoy them, and fewer glitches.
• It’s been a reality in 2008, and will get even more obvious by 2009: consumers dictate what they want as an user experience, corporate (office) computing follows, just the opposite as what was going on in the eighties. But perhaps a better way of putting it is that those lines defined by mom and pop marketing concepts are blurring. 
• Office computing, the good old days: Microsoft seems to have some trouble implementing ODF. But they claim to have no difficulty with OOXML. That alone should remind all of us of an all too well known pattern: the format wars. It’s made a come-back ever since 2007, it will get sneaker, although less flamboyant in 2009.
• Microsoft is changing. Yes you read that well, on this blog. I sincerely think that there is an old guard and a new guard in Microsoft. I also think that this company is becoming more and more like any other big business: people will be fired by the thousands, and that does not make me happy. But while some of the teams there want to play a normal game, most of the people who call the shots don’t want to do that; hence friction will be in the air. I don’t really expect to see a visible schism inside Microsoft happening before 2011-2012, but it will be interesting to watch what will be going on in 2009 on this issue.

Resolutions

• This year, I promess: I will make money. I swear. Tons of money. Yeah, right. 
•  I’ll get greener. I don’t have a car, happen to eat organic food very frequently, recycle my trash, but there are many other ways I can contribute to save the planet.
• That’s it, you caught me right there: I will come back on GNU/Linux. What this means is that in my craziest deams, I will have a real workstation with Linux, and a nice MacBook(Pro?) running OS X. Aside DRM on iTunes which seems to stand on an EOL support ever since yesterday, Macs are pretty cool, both on hardware and software. But I miss Linux. I really do.
• Using Linux, I will mostly use KDE 4. I tried it, configured it on several desktops and although it’s not fully completed, it rocks and it’s really impressive. You should give it a try.
• Last but not least? Think hard about how not to annoy my readers.