Sean Wallbridge
We’ve had this discussion around the office (at itgroove) and here are our predictions for SharePoint and other technologies in 2010…
Sean Says…
- Demand for SharePoint is still on the lower crest of the tidal wave in my opinion. I expect we’ll see even greater demand and momentum in 2010, particularly with the arrival and enthusiasm behind SharePoint 2010. 2007 has been around for some time … yet the convergence of related technologies getting faster and better (bandwidth, maturity of browsers/technologies and more acceptance by end users of web based business), has only recently meant that SharePoint is really becoming a household name and need. This is particularly noticeable in the SMB market that I primarily play in – SharePoint isn’t just for the Enterprise. SharePoint is a product that can change how a company does business – whether deployed across the Enterprise, or simply providing a ‘quick win’ for a departmental application.
In addition, acceptance and increased interest in the “cloud” and the ability to fire up a SharePoint site “today”, should result in even more businesses looking to SharePoint to exorcise technology demons such as the waste of energy that exists in email today. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the uptake of SharePoint in the next 12 months to reach figures close to double the total implementations of SharePoint to date.
Businesses, attitudes and networks are ready for SharePoint … now.
- With all of the talk of businesses moving to the cloud, something big (and bad) is going to happen. There are too many lessons to learn, too many processes to fine tune and too little understanding (on both sides, client and vendor) for the Cloud to be totally smooth. I predict at least one of the big Cloud providers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) to have a big, and public problem. Somethong to the magnitude of either businesses losing (permanently) significant data or an outage that spans a full day, kicking the crap out of their 99.9% uptime guarantee (99.9% uptime, means less than 9 hours of downtime, per year)
Robert Says…
- Microsoft will continue to see an erosion in its market share. While new releases such as SharePoint 2010 (and Office 2010 that hook into it) will drive sales into certain segments of the business marketplace, continuing missteps on the software giant’s part will drive more and more customers into “the cloud” and the arms of its competitors. As Windows becomes less important as a primary platform and the various Interwebs become more important, many users and companies will question the need to stick with Microsoft and Microsoft, in turn will perform more retrenching. I believe we will see a more focused Microsoft emerge from the process but it will be a somewhat humbled company with a much smaller product portfolio.
Darren Says…
- I think Apple will contine to slowly gain marketshare over PC’s. As more of our “work” becomes online and accessible from anywhere on anything it will be less about the OS and more about the users preference.
- I predict that MS Office will become less of a business staple. The ever increasing cost will deter businesses from forking out the big bucks for a productivity suite that is being used less and less. A great example is webmail. More users everyday are using it over Outlook.
- As the economy has slowed and people now have more options to get their products and services, the truly customer focused companies will survive and thrive while the companies that were riding the wave will dwindle and fall from the vine.
Avi Says…
- I predict that in 2010, RIM will introduce a new Blackberry handheld that that will rival the iPhone, not just with looks and sexy design, but with an array of new apps. Although the Storm has a touchscreen, BlackBerry must produce some pretty heavy software to compete with the iPhone’s 90,000 available apps.
- Now that the Hadron Collider is back on track after 18 months of repairs, I predict that in 2010 the scientsts at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) should make some serious breakthroughs with particle collision, and hopefully provide some insight into the creation of the universe (big bang).
And Louis Says…
- As “netbooks” grow to the realm of 14″ screens and more beefier tech they will stop coming out with new models every few weeks and return to their roots as laptops. Not only are they now almost as big as the smaller laptops these days, but they are catching up hardware wise pretty quickly. I think the craze of “netbooks” will finally end and they will just fit into the lower end of the laptop spectrum as just smaller portable computers.
- 2010 will be the year of 3D everything. With 3D TV’s already out and the 3D Blu-ray specification finalized the technology is at the front step of pushing itself into home use. With new solutions being pushed on the computer side by major manufactures such as Nvidia and the phenomenal success of Avatar, I predict 2010 to be the year everything goes 3D.