I Know When You’ve Been Bad or Good

November 27th, 2006

Not really, but I can make some predictions about technology…

While I was on vacation with the family up in Summit County, I got to watch one of my favorite Christmas movies. It was pretty cold outside with some flurries blowing around, and we had a nice little fire going. I was huddled up with the kiddos watching “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”.

My favorite character is the Winter Warlock… that dude is cool . Winter has this tough exterior but is just a softie on the inside – reminds me a lot of folks I know in the real world. After righting his wrongs, Winter pulls a trick out of his bag and hands it off to Chris Cringle. That trick affords Chris the ability to roll up a snowball and peek into the lives of all those naughty kids.

In the spirit of my buddy Winter and the ’07 predictions that are soon to come, I will do my best to peek into my foggy crystal techno ball. But I am going to skip 2007 cause that’s too easy; I will jump into 2008. In 2008, we will see a resurgence of the desktop. That’s right the desktop lives again!

But, we are now seeing a big push to “port” desktop apps to the Web. Even Google is doing this (Writely, JotSpot, etc) and MSFT seems to be putting a lot of effort into the wep app space with Windows Live (see the Personalize Page link). This must be where technology is headed - onto the Web and the desktop is toast you say? I say maybe not!

In 2007 we will certainly see more desktop apps find their way onto the Web, but in 2008 we will begin to turn back the clock and see the rise of the desktop once again. Here is why:
1. Blazing network speeds into the home
2. Cheap processing power in the home
3. Cheap storage in the home
4. Peer to Peer technologies
5. Distributed applications on the edges
6. IPV6 – this is BIG
7. Amazing user experiences with Vista
8. AND applications that leverage all the above

Most developers will be busy in the coming months doing the desktop to web porting thing, but some enterprising developers will recognize the power of 1-7 above and will build some revolutionary apps. A little over a year ago, I built a prototype that demonstrates all this goodness. I may need to dust this code off and show at a future Boulder Technology Meetup for someone to pickup.

Oh, and 4-6 years after that, we will see another push to get applications off the edges and back to centralized servers just because we can… And one more thing, in 2008 mobile will be even better :)

Entry Filed under: Mobile