“Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.” Niels Bohr
And so, with tongue lodged firmly in cheek…
2004 will be the year of Linux on the desktop. What I mean by that is that Linux on the PC will become a respectable alternative to Windows in the business world. The breakthrough deal for desktop Linux occurred last year when the local government in Munich opted for thousands of Linux desktops running Star Office and other deals have followed. However, the trend has not yet gained momentum. In 2004 it will. Continuing its server success, Linux will continue to grow server market share at the expense of both Windows and other versions of Unix, but it will not overtake Windows on the server until 2005.
2004 will be the year in which the idea of the “appliance PC” is finally established. By “an appliance PC”, I mean one that is intended for a given well-defined purpose. Games machines such as the Play Station and X-Box are appliances of a kind. Sun’s Java Desktop is an appliance PC aimed at the business market. By “established” I mean that the “appliance PC” concept will at last get into the heads of the marketing forces in the PC market. The paradox of the PC market is that even though over 100 million PCs are sold each year, the PC has not become a commodity. As such, it is defying normal economic logic. As it is currently sold, it is a far more complex-to-use product than, say, a car, but as yet no-one has managed to do a good job of packaging it simply, say, with browsing and home office capability and little else. I expect this to start happening (with success) in 2004.
Last Year, I suggested that Apple would continue to teach HP the meaning of the word “invent” and indeed they did, successfully inventing the iTunes download music service and successfully releasing the powerful G5 machines, resulting among other things in the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University building one of the largest supercomputers by assembling 1100 G5s. The Panther release of OS X improved the UI and Apple is the first PC company to embrace RSS. In 2004 Apple will continue to teach HP and others about invention and it will grow its share of the PC market, dominating the high end of the market.
In 2003, utility computing became an established trend, with many companies both vendors and users moving in that direction. IBM won some big deals on the back of it, justifying its move into that space and VMWare became an industry force because of it. Utility computing is now becoming the order of the day. This is not a stoppable trend. The simple reality is that the chip industry has been slavishly obedient to Moore’s Law over decades and we have finally got to the point where the way that we have deployed computers and software makes no sense. The reality is that companies are obliged to buy ever more storage because of a largely genuine need to cater for ever more stored data, but they don’t need much more processing power (or memory), they need efficient use of it. This is what utility computing is all about right now. It’s about manageability. So what will happen in 2004? I expect to see the one company that has ignored this trend, Dell, be forced onto the band-wagon. It makes eminent sense for Dell to move in this direction and it may have the opportunity to do so because of its partnership with EMC – speaking of whom….
The surprise company of 2003 was EMC, with its acquisitions of Legato, Documentum and VMWare – all, in my view, very valuable assets. I personally do not believe that it will stop there. The company is clearly moving into software in a meaningful way and we can expect to see further acquisitions. One could argue that it had to do this because of strong competition in the SAN market which has now become more and more about storage management. In 2004 I expect to see EMC acquire a system management company, and given its acquisition record so far, I expect it to be another intelligent acquisition. EMC has yet to prove that it can integrate its acquisitions. I believe it will be successful in doing this, from the indications so far.
In a prediction that saw wide syndication last year, (it even made it into the Financial Times), I compared Web Services to Sex with Aliens – “some people say it happens, but no-one seems to be able to produce any evidence”. To be precise, I was excluding internal web services applications that are confined within the corporate network from the picture, where security is usually adequate and early Web Services technology was already being deployed. Anyway 2004 will see the beginning of the deployment of web services. It will be for real – and, this year, it will be like teenage sex – there will be a lot more talk than action. The security issues are being addressed and the development products from BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Progress et al, are much more mature than last year.
In 2004, the IT Security malaise will finally begin to come under control in most businesses. There are several reasons for suggesting this. First, the level of security breaches has got to crisis level with 90 percent of companies experiencing breaches of one kind or another. 2003 was at least 50 percent worse than 2002 which was twice as bad as 2001 and so on. This has released IT budgets to address the issue and prompted some companies to appoint CSOs. On top of this a good deal of legislation has emerged which encourages – but doesn’t mandate – an adequate investment in security (it includes Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA in the US and various Data Protection legislation in Europe). This has caught the attention of senior executives, especially in the US and thus helps the CIO or CSO to make a case for security spending. Third, Microsoft, whose Windows OS is all too often the source of security breaches realized in 2003 that it needs to do a lot better, so it is seriously investing. All of this points to a decrease in the IT security problem. But we can also add a 4th point – the IT security technology is both improving and getting cheaper.
In 2004 the spam will finally drop away. I believe the EU legislation on this is focused enough to stop it in Europe. Unfortunately, in the US the legislation was subject to a gradual watering down by marketing lobbyists, so the law there has false teeth. This is a pity because all the big spam operations are in the US. Nevertheless, the US law can still bite – it forces spammers to go completely illegal or identify themselves, which means that blocking them will be a good deal easier. According to several reports the spammers are not making money (they must have saturated the market for Viagra and penis extensions). Some of the spammers will go illegal (using Trojan software planted on home PCs), but it is a desperation tactic that has no long term business future,
I expect 2004 to be the year of RSS. In case you don’t know what it is, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is technology that allows web sites to push URLs and headlines at you. You may remember PointCast (a similar idea, which delivered news content and died a welcome death at about the time of the millennium, because it saturated corporate networks with traffic). Pointcast was the right idea and the wrong technology. There is a need for aggregated information services and RSS fulfills the need better than email ever will. Email is the dominant medium for now, but RSS is better and spam-proof. RSS has already won the hearts and minds of the geek community. Watch it take off in 2004.
Finally, I believe that 2004 will be the year of the MySQL database. Unlike Linux and Apache, MySQL has not been a publicity magnet, but its use is growing and it stands on the verge of being taken seriously as a database to compete with Oracle, DB2 and SQLServer. It is already eating into their market share through the word-of-mouth marketing that turned Linux and Apache into formidable forces in their own right. This could be interesting to watch as Oracle and IBM have been major supporters of Linux, but both have much revenue to lose if MySQL gains real momentum. Don’t expect to see complimentary comments about it emerging from either of these companies. (and, of course, Microsoft already believes Open Source to be a product of International terrorism).
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