Looking back at my 08 review and predictions for 09, with the exception of social media talk and promise everywhere, not much has changed this year, same players are still in the game and still leading the charge, but with some new products. There are of course new trends popping up daily, but until I can distinguish them based on value, I won’t spend much time on them. So – some of the names making the news last year:
Twitter is still growing strong, to my surprise – I thought it would have flattened by now as the new cool thing would show up for new media gurus to jump on. Also, the mainstream always lags behind pioneers by couple of years. That explains why Facebook is seeing biggest growth this year (2 years after it exploded in Toronto and about a year after I stopped using it on a daily basis), despite lack of any new groundbreaking features except for Facebook Connect. And while Facebook will continue to grow and be part of every household, like email, my jury on Twitter is still out , despite the fact that you cannot engage into conversation about Internet or media without the mention of it. I am still not convinced – I may be wrong but sometimes taking bold predictions and being dead wrong is also fun.
Social Media Everything… I’ll dedicate one line to it, because there are some good things and lot of crap and it’s a separate topic anyways.
Cloud computing continued to grow this year, although the mainstream penetration and adoption is slower than expected. Azure, Amazon and Rackspace have added features (Google Apps has been quiet this year), and cloud based productivity apps were growing as expected but it will be years before businesses start relying on cloud for their core business infrastructure.
Apple – continued to deliver stylish products, but no revolutionary things this year, iPhone is a hard act to follow, unless next year they finally release device I’ve been waiting for over a year now (see last year’s post) – iPad
Microsoft – finally has a decent OS – Win7, active cloud development Azure and new versions of Office, SharePoint and .NET 4 in the works, slated for next year. None of these should be reason for celebration as they are existing MS revenue sources and won’t take MS into the next decade as a leader. But MS did manage to make big splash in the news with its new promising search engine:
Bing made a little scare in the Google world this year as it was, to everyone’s surprise, actually decent product. This immediately started talks about challenge to Google etc. I think they are still light years behind in terms of mind share and the know how (not so technologically, but in the knowledge you constantly acquire and evolve by serving 70% of worlds searches). But with acquisition of Yahoo search, Bing will gain more of the market share and the insight into the large volume search data, that will potentially help them improve the engine further. All of this is good, since it will force Google to innovate again (last year I compared them to IE6 – not having any serious competition, their search innovation almost stopped). This is particularly useful, since last year’s promising search technologies, like semantic search, failed to make any mayor impact.
Google – almost always warrants a post of its own, but I’ll squeeze couple of thoughts in a paragraph:
Active and innovating, as usual, providing mix of good service improvements (Google Docs and Google Sites have improved greatly and will become significant player in corporate arena soon) and a couple of not so great starts, that nevertheless received raves from tech trend followers and guru wannabes, just because they came out of Google:
Chrome OS – I love Chrome Browser and use it all the time. And I use cloud service for everything good enough for my needs, not by comparing them feature by feature with desktop products. But I will move to the cloud when the services are ready, not when the browser/os limits my other choices. Linux is free and has a free browser that can access all features that Chrome OS can, yet consumers didnt flock to it, because they still need the polish/responsiveness offered by commercial OS-es – Win7 and Mac OSX. When web apps catch up, people will move to the cloud and the browser, with or without Chrome OS. Stripped down Linux limited with single browser will certainly not be the driver.
Google Wave – something is wrong when many people desperately ask questions like “Tell me why this awesome new Google product is so awesome. I am obviously stupid, since I don’t get it’s usefulness and greatness and how it is making my life better”. Emperor’s new clothes, someone?
This is all I can think of in terms of technology in 09 – maybe I was too focused and immersed in my current job – (building organization and the product around our hosted CMS product for large media companies – http://www.topscms.com), and maybe I missed some things. But based on the above, I’d have to say that Twitter was the clear winner in terms of mind share and activity around it as well as based on the influence it’s making not only to other technologies but media in general. Contrary to my predictions (for now), but I have to acknowledge the facts 
L8r
d.
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