My Predictions - Revisited :)

Some time early last year, I made these eleven predictions for 2007 - let's go back and see where we have come with them in these last 12-18 months :)

1) Vista will be highly acclaimed by engineers, but will be shunned by buyers, until Miscrocoft goes for a drastic price reduction.
Half-true. Shunned by buyers, and well, ignored by engineers too! Needs too much to get it to run, and is too expensive an option - not much when it comes to value-for-money, Vista will probably never really deserve the popularity of XP, but I am sure Microsoft will soon make sure, some way or the other, that you have no choice! A point of inflexion might come when 64-bit takes off (more an issue of availability of 64-bit and the discontinuation of 32-bit!), and the world is left with no choice but to upgrade. Mind you, this will also be a good opportunity for migration!

2) SQL Server 2005 will be the database of choice for most SMEs and SaaS providers, with IE 7 and .NET 3.0 being the platform of choice.
2005 has definitely taken off, and we see more and more SMEs jumping on the 2005, and now, 2008 bandwagon! The all-in-one package definitely makes SQL Server a very attractive option! .NET 3.0 is yet to really take off, but WPF and Silverlight have a lot of promise. Silverlight has had a bad start though - the move from 1.2 to 2.0 is VERY PAINFUL, and definitely won't endear it to developers and end-users alike.

3) Google will get into the television and media advertising market, changing focus into a media company.
We are still some way off from this one, but Google is definitely branching out into mobile services, Internet and applications. Still interesting to see how this pans out...

4) Google Enterprise platform will be a big failure, and get converted into an open/free source community showcase with no other application in the commercial world.
Google Enterprise hasn't really taken off, though there is still some noise. I guess the key issues are the same - people are fundamentally not happy keeping their data on the cloud! And uninterrupted Internet connectivity is still a dream...

5) Google will move it's data centers to Canada or maybe even the Arctic! Yahoo and Microsoft will follow suit.
I need to check this out :) I am sure it's happening... Well, the prediction was based on the premise that cost of air conditioning is the critical factor in running data centers, and makes up for most of the cost!

6) Microsoft Live.com will fail to take off. So will Virtual Earth and Map Point, till Microsoft makes it free to use.
True, again! We are yet to see Live.com taking off, and Map Point and Virtual Earth nowhere close to Google Earth. It's all about money, honey! Paying per transaction is still too heavy on the pockets.

7) Ruby on Rails will be a serious contender in University projects - but not in the commercial space
Ruby on Rails is definitely catching up, and yes, it's mostly still in the academia than in serious commercial projects.. though IBM is showing some interest in it.

8) Microsoft will tie up with Sun - sounds outrageous?
Not happened yet, though it did attempt a tie up with Yahoo for it's Internet search business!

9) Intel will get a major boost because of Vista 64 bit
Interestingly, now it seems it might be the other way round!

10) SaaS will come to mean "renting out software deployed in your captive data center"
I am not sure about rest of the world, but I am definitely looking at this as the best way to do SaaS - and a number of our customers do agree. Coupled with virtualization, this is a killer.

11) Virtualization will be big, and a critical component of any web based software delivery model.
Very true! So very true...