2012 Forecast: Pulling out the Crystal Ball

The year 2011 has been characterized by revolutionary fervor - change is everywhere, often coming out of nowhere, upending the traditional establishment that had held sway for so long. It's a motif that's played out in the streets worldwide as financiers everywhere went from being the wunderkinds and heroes of entrepreneurship to becoming grasping, thieving robber barons, at least in the public perception, and as people tossed out of work, tossed out of their homes, in short becoming the ultimate disposables, finally started fighting back. Egypt's president for life, Hosni Mubarak, found himself on the losing end of a street protest that ended up turning the military against him, and now awaits trial for murder and embezzlement. Libya's Col. Muammar Gaddafi fought an unsuccessful civil war, ultimately to end up killed in a ditch. The governments of Berlusconi of Italy and Papandreou of Greece both fell, due to widespread dissent and sovereign credit ratings, and even today there are several other countries - from Germany and Spain to Yemen and Syria - that are in danger of falling to populist discontent.

In the United States, this was the year of Occupy Wall Street, an encampment of tens of thousands of activists in New York who protested the growing divide between the top 1% and the remaining 99% of the US population. The movement quickly spread, and while tilted progressive, did not necessarily fall cleanly into the Democrat/Republican divide. My own take here is that what you're seeing here is an epochal shift in political alignments between the existing centralizing status quo and the increasingly powerful distributed mentality that has been at the heart of IT struggles for decades. The last major shift occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which the socially conservative and fiscally moderate deep south voters switched to the Republican side of the aisle in response to the gains in civil rights by minorities and women. While the previous one occurred forty years before that with the rise of the labor unions.

The Occupy movement hallmark is that it is calling for the relocalization of economic and political power, and is as much the long term counter-force to the transnationals as anything. The camps, for the most part, have been forcibly closed, but I don't believe for a moment that this is the end of the movement. One of the most striking features of most of the revolutions that have taken place is that they are being done by Children of the Internet - people (mostly under thirty) who have lived with the Internet for much or most of their lives, and are as comfortable maintaining virtual communities and communications as their parents are uncomfortable. The OWS movement did what marches and similar protests over the wars or similar issues failed to do - they broke the fourth wall, became part of the news cycle, and for the most part gained the sympathy and awareness of a large percentage of people who have felt themselves isolated, which may very well spell bad news for those who benefit from having a divided audience, consumer base, or constituency.

So what does this have to do with an IT forecast? Quite a lot, actually. This theme of distributed vs centralized power is actually driving a fair number of changes in technology, which in turn translates into the broader societal changes. In the next year, these will become dominant themes.

1. Android loses the battles but wins the war over Apple. The death of Steve Jobs this past year is likely to mark the start of the decline of Apple as a company that will likely continue through much of the rest of the decade. This is not so much due to the acumen of Jobs as a designer or even a salesman (which was, admittedly, legendary) but because so much of Apple's identity was wrapped up in Jobs. Tim Cook is a fabulous designer, but he is not Steve Jobs, and its likely that over the next year there will be a steady migration of employees out of Apple towards the other major magnet in the Bay Area ... Google. Indeed, while Apple won a patent suit against HTC, the terms were far less than Apple had originally requested, with a large enough period of time in the injunction for Google to make appropriate changes. For it's part, Google is somewhat insulated from Apple's suits, making it hard for Apple to come up with a legal injunction against the search company directly. This will force Apple into a multi-pronged legal battle against other vendors, and one bad decision could undermine the rest. This is money that could have been used for R & D, which cuts down on the potential for "insanely great" new game changing products coming out of the Apple pipeline. Expect Android-based phones and eventually tablets to completely dominate the market by this time next year, sans a possible but unlikely surge from Microsoft in this space. On the same front, RIM will be out of business by Jan 1, 2013.

2. Microsoft gets a new CEO. Steve Ballmer recently showed up in eWeek's worst CEOs of 2011 list as #2. Microsoft stock has lost half of it's value since the tech peak of $58 in 2000 - at the close of trade on 12/20 it was $25.53 a share. Google Office is beginning to eat seriously into its online Office foray, Windows 7 sales are up compared to Windows Vista, but Vista was a bomb. Microsoft was late to the mobile game, and is now in a position where it's essentially ceding its control of hardware to Nokia as a last ditch effort by both companies. Google Chrome now has more penetration than Internet Explorer 8 and 9 combined. This is just a short list of the problems facing Microsoft today. Azure is doing modestly well, but it has nowhere near the penetration of Amazon EC2.

A new, younger CEO at Microsoft may be more in tune with both the technology and the markets. I'd personally like to see Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra offered the position - he was one of the key architects for Microsoft .NET (one of Microsoft's few major successes in the last decade), has been instrumental in getting Android off the ground for Google, and has both the vision and the business savvy to mobilize the organization. Moreover, I believe that Gundotra has a global world view that could help Microsoft re-establish themselves worldwide as a competitive brand, and he has the engineering reputation among the ground troops at Microsoft to give him a degree of credibility and respect there that I don't believe Ballmer has ever really managed to acquire.

Regardless, I believe that a regime change is in the air; if it doesn't come, it only confirms that Microsoft will likely to continue to slide into irrelevance. Microsoft is trading at 1/20th that of both Google and Apple, and at some point, even shareholders will revolt.

3. Google takes some lumps, comes out stronger. 2011 was a mixed year for Google - Android did well (though is showing growing pains), Google Office is becoming increasingly the go to cloud office suite of choice, Chrome is gaining strength, Google Plus debuted to mixed reaction, but seems to have acquired the critical mass necessary to survive, something that neither Wave nor Buzz quite managed to accomplish - and Plus is increasingly being looked at by companies as being a good foundation for corporate social messaging services. It has so far managed to stave off anti-trust investigations that caused so much pain to IBM then later Microsoft. It has taken a few lumps as well - it had a couple of outages in 2011 which forced managers to (rightly) consider that aspect of going to the cloud, and the early signs of its foray into Amazon like book sales are not as robust as the company most likely hoped.

I expect that 2012 will likely be more of the same. The company is reorienting itself towards competition with Apple and Amazon at this stage, and away from the "traditional" Microsoft rivalry (which is probably a sound strategy as long as Ballmer is CEO, though that could change with a change at the top). There is no question that Google has become the driving force behind HTML5 (for good or ill), and many of the decisions there, such as the strengthening of the browser for animation and related functionality, the dropping of support for Flash-based video in favor of less proprietary formats, and the beefing up of "stock" APIs is clearly aimed not at Microsoft but at Adobe. This strategy could still backfire, but clearly other browser vendors are also in favor of reducing the hold of Flash on their systems.

The biggest concerns that will likely arise for Google will be those related to privacy. Google face recognition is an intriguing technology, but it obviously has profound ramifications for privacy violations, and this, along with voice recognition and semantic awareness, offer a dual edged sword that might provide problematic for the company if the wrong set of circumstances arise (a famous person gets arrested in a case of mistaken identity, for instance).

There's another question mark here - what about Mozilla? The Firefox browser certainly helped launch the modern web, but in and of itself it was only sustainable because Google paid the company several million dollars a year for insuring that the default search engine was Google. There are indications that this deal may be ending, in part because Google obviously has its own browser to be thinking about. Not surprisingly, this has prompted some serious soul searching on the part of Mozilla about what their mission is moving forward, which was most recently articulated in a blog post by Mozilla architect David Ascher. Beyond competing against Chrome, they are also increasingly competing against mobile apps (which have a different model for delivery for the web). David's goals are laudable, though whether they will translate into life-post-Google still remains to be seen.

4. Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter and Social Media. The merging of social media and mobile will continue unabated during 2012, to the extent that most people will likely interact via social media over mobile devices other than laptops by the end of the year. I'd even be willing to predict here that the next major social media phenomena will likely start on mobile devices first, and only later make the jump to more traditional computers. Facebook is clearly well into its juggernaut phase - it's the 800 pound gorilla in the space, and it will likely remain there for a few more years, though I expect that Google+ and others will start to erode that space over time. On the other hand, Facebook does not look like it will make the jump successfully to the enterprise market, which makes it vulnerable - social media tends to be dominated by teens and young adults in general, and they are remarkably fickle about staying with any social media platform for long. However, I think Facebook as an authentication mechanism will continue to grow (though again, this puts it in direct competition with Google doing the same thing).

Linked-In IPO'd this year, which may have been a mistake. Linked-In's greatest value has always been to the job seeker, and with the economy continuing to sputter and likely headed into another recession (as if we ever left the first) in 2012, jobs are few and far between. It's value as a business card is increasing - Linked-In is, in many respects, what FOAF always was intended to be - but whether this will translate into revenue still remains to be seen. I was dubious about the value of the IPO, and to date have seen little to make me feel that as a business there's enough revenue to support it.

Twitter, on the other hand, endures, and I don't necessarily seeing that changing in 2012. It's become too valuable to too many organizations at the moment. My biggest worries with Twitter are two-fold: a fail whale of the entire infrastructure and a sudden collapse as overnight the service ceases to be relevant.

5. Mobile and Tablets. I've been dancing around the mobile space for a while in this forecast, but the reality is that mobile will be the dominant client computing platform by the end of 2012, with the only real gating factor being on the production side. The tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan has hit supply channels globally hard, especially with regard to screen technologies, and this is keeping prices higher than they would have been otherwise, while on the flip side with the magic $199.95 price point broken with the Amazon Kindle Fire, there will be downward pressure on prices that will reduce the overall margins on these products from obscenely healthy to thin but acceptable. By this time next year it's likely that there will be a number of tables (I'd guess those by HTC, Sony and Samsung) that offer 9" tablets for under $200). This should shoot the adoption rate through the roof.

From an IT perspective, this trend should be one of the most closely watched of any. Mobile deployments force changes in application development strategies, interface design and services architectures. It puts more emphasis on JIT web services that can be cached in and out for better memory utilization. It means that touch-centric designs become preferred to specialized mouse scrolling, and pushes development away from complex web pages and towards higher navigability. On the other hand, it also offers a degree of context that more traditional applications don't have - a sense of location, motion and even orientation, a distinct identity, multiple modals of interaction (voice, typing, touch, even shaking), the deployment of one or more cameras, proximity sensors and so forth.

A personal anecdote illustrates both the potential and the failure of realization that this combination of features provides. Recently I was at a Target buying a Christmas tree. Most of the trees featured QRCodes on the display for the tree, and the price was nowhere to be seen. Thinking that this could get me that information, I scanned the QRCode with my phone, only to find myself directed to a website (obvious designed for a laptop) that showed all of the christmas trees that Target was selling, but neither price nor availability information for that particular tree. This falls into the Epic Fail category - the information was clearly available with the store systems, but such systems were not connected to the catalog system.

I believe that 2012 is likely to see more successes and failures in this arena. Japanese mobile users have relied on their mobile devices as wallets for several years now, the demand is clearly there (privacy concerns not-withstanding) but realistically the supply channels and infrastructure to support this is still a ways out. Mobile is a different paradigm than traditional programming.

There's another aspect of the mobile revolution that I find intriguing. You're seeing an odd form of comparison shopping emerge, where people will go to a big box store, see something the like, scan a bar code or QRCode and store the resulting web content. Later, they go online (tablet or laptop), retrieve the data, then find the lowest price for that item from online vendors and purchase it that way. I noticed this behavior when I went to FAO Schwartz near Central Park in Manhattan. Lots of lookers, many with cell phones in hand surreptitiously "shopping", but relatively few buyers. As a long term trend, it does not bode well for brick and mortar stores, but few things do in this day and age.

As far as tech goodies go, I'm still waiting for the clamshell tablet, something you're already seeing with gaming consoles. The tablets are hinged along the long edge, and can be used either as a "laptop" with a virtual keyboard, as a double-wide tablet, or as a detachable two person gaming console. I suspect that tactile actuators may also be on their way, but there's nothing on the horizon yet there with regard to consumer-based products.

6. The NoSQL database becomes a major factor in the database world, and XML news Relational databases are not going anywhere any time soon, but 2011 saw the rise of the "upstarts" - non-relational databases of various stripes, from column-centric DBs to MongoDB and CouchDB providing json-based storage, the 4G XML databases including MarkLogic, eXist, and EMC xdb, and graph stores and triple stores. This is actually a trend that started in 2011, but it's definitely picking up steam. Such databases generally scale quite well, are able to manage "folded" content (such as complex object instances), and are usually web aware. 28ms is currently working on a javascript analog to XQuery, which opens up the possibilities of a common grammar for manipulating both XML and JSON type datastores, and I expect that this effort will start to bear real fruit towards the end of next year.

The XML "revolution" has largely run out of steam. It's primary bastions are now in content management systems (where it will stay), the federal space, publishing (especially legal and financial publishing), archival systems and the like. In a way, this isn't really that much of a surprise - this is the same space where SGML reigned supreme for many years, and while for a while it achieved a fair dominance in service architectures and the like (and still plays a part in RESTful services), it's not likely to play a big part in more programming-centric modeling. Some of the migration for the other uses of XML is in JSON, and I think it would be a wise strategy for XML Database vendors such as MarkLogic or EMC to think about launching a parallel product line based upon their indexing technology but centered around JSON as a core, not so much because the technology is different but because there is definitely a market space right now for a commercial grade indexed JSON that I believe such companies could VERY handily exploit with comparatively little investment.

I've been spending some time thinking about Hadoop as part of this broader strategy. Right now (Dec 2011) Hadoop has rather taken the programming world by storm. I think there is a space for Hadoop, largely in the ingestion pipelines that so many large scale "Big Data" CMS systems now are working at. In this case, you have a large number of "documents" which are in various encodings, some more primitive than others, and you want to be able to consume this data and store it in a more or less homogeneous fashion. In this case, you can parallelize multiple processing pipelines and incorporate content suitable for the containment system (such as an XML or JSON data store). However, I also think that there are more players in the space right now than it can absorb, the needs for this kind of processing (especially given the complexity of the processing in the frist place) not-withstanding, and that in many cases vendors may end up being more likely to provide alternative ingestion mechanisms that are more specifically custom to their own environment. As a consequence, I'd tread carefully in this space - it's ripe for significant churn.

7. Semantics and Linked Data finally have their day. For several years, I've been writing that the Semantic Web will likely hit the mainstream around 2012-4, and I actually think that it's finally getting there now. Semantic Web users groups have proliferated just in the last year, there are both good commercial and free tools on the market, and I'm seeing a larger number of RFPs and even job listings that require some Semantic Web / RDF / Linked Data knowledge than I can ever remember. I've actively shifted over a lot of my own development work into that space, and my conversations with other people in the XML field indicate that a lot of the more prescient ones are likewise making that jump.

There are several reasons for this. Data modeling is emerging as a science in its own right, and the overlap between schema development, ontological definition and semantic modeling is considerable. The hardware and software for working with RDF triples efficiently are both reaching a suitable tipping point. Organizations are beginning to understand that relationships between entities are often as (or more important) than the definitions of entities themselves, and as such as beginning to seek out technologies that model such relationships well. Finally, a lot of pilot projects that were started in the 2008-2010 time frame concluded successfully, and organizations are now adapting what they've learned from this into more formalized venues.

Those trends should carry over to 2012, and likely will start overlapping with mobile systems and cataloguing systems. Apple's Siri is built on semantics, and I'm seeing other semantically aware applications (part of the overall context revolution) beginning to show up in mobile applications as well. Ironically, Apple's recent lawsuit on embedded data may very well make semantic solutions such as RDFa more attractive as a "standardized" way of passing such semantics into markup, and the decision of the HTML5 working group to move forward with RDFa in HTML (http://dev.w3.org/html5/rdfa/) after earlier fighting against it I believe bodes well for such embedded semantic tagging.

8. Languages. I'll touch on this one only briefly, as I've been out of this space for long enough to not speak to it well. For the past several years one of the most influential languages in use today has been one that ironically enough has very little code actually written in it - the language Haskell. Haskell popularized the concept of closures, declarative programming in general, of functions as first class objects, of the use of monads and other similar features that have found their way into everything from XQuery to JavaScript to D and CoffeeScript. Not surprisingly, a lot of these concepts first surfaced in Lisp, lo these many years ago, but many of these capabilities seem to have greatest applicability in distributed languages like Eiffel and distributed architectures like the RESTful web. I expect that trend to continue for some time; call it the revenge of the declarative programmer.

9. The IT employment picture ... sucks. Yeah, no two ways of painting it, even in IT the job picture is bleak, though certainly nowhere near as bad as for the population overall. Skilled programmers are still in demand, but you may have to go further afield to get work in that area. Consulting is probably a safer bet at the moment - a lot of companies are not doing badly, but they are examining the headwinds coming from Europe and a potentially slow sales period (as well as likely further consolidation in the financial sector, which tends to be a big user of IT skills) and are going to contract rather than full time labor when possible. As a guess, the unemployment rate in IT nationally is probably in the 5-6% range, which is lower than the national average but still historically high for IT. What makes this worse is that what's in demand are primarily specialized skills or combinations of skills; programmers coming out of college could be facing some serious challenges getting hired, though once hired, they will likely stay employed if they're competent.

One driver for this is that there are relatively few STEM professionals coming out of US colleges and universities. Meanwhile, people that entered into IT in the 80s and 90s are now in management positions or have left the field, many permanently, as the cost involved in reacquiring relevant skills climbs inexorably the longer you are out of the field. In practice this means that there's a growing deficit of skilled senior apprentice and journeymen programmers in the system, especially in areas where tech companies tend to congregate. This has led companies to put off their IT projects, but many applications written six to ten years ago are now becoming stale and irrelevant to existing business needs.

Consequently, even in what may prove a bad economy next year, hiring prospects for IT professionals will be better than average, albeit for a pretty poor average. It may (almost certainly will, in fact) require relocation, but the work is there.

10. The world ... ehrrmmmm. The Mayans may have pegged it right, after all. 2012 is looking to be dark and foreboding - too many countries are now bankrupt courtesy of financial services giants run amuck, and this is now pitting the very wealthy who are seeking to be made whole for bad investments against the rest of their respective populations. In the US, it's an election year, with a fairly unpopular president facing against even more unpopular challengers, and with 30% of both House and Senate up for grabs, meaning that political posturing will almost assuredly trump good governance. The government helped the IT sector considerably in 2008-2009 - many of the programs enacted had obvious IT ramifications - but by 2012 the ability to get any kind of legislation through Congress that involves the creation of jobs is pretty much doomed.

There is a silver lining to all of this. It's very likely that the period 2012 to mid-2013 will be bad, bad enough that we may see unemployment rates shoot back up to above 11% (though I don't think they will be quite that bad). Several large businesses, especially financial institutions, will be "allowed" to fail gracefully. Others will face a much harder landing. Credit may be almost impossible to come by, particularly towards the 3rd quarter of 2012. However, that will also likely be the nadir of the greater Recession. Most people will be somewhat poorer, some people will be much poorer, but a lot of the overhang of unfulfillable debt will have been eliminated because it will be deemed as uncollectable. Businesses will shift into becoming more virtual and distributed, and governance will likely migrate back to the local level because the larger entities will be less able to act in as concentrated a manner. This is a reset moment for the economy, but it will also change the priorities of what constitutes work, and how exactly the social contract is defined. I'm not sure how it will play out - it could prove to be a much needed catharsis, it might end up giving us all an all too up-close look at the world of Mad Max, but more than likely it will be a refactoring, a necessary exercise to take ourselves into the next century.