Upon 2020

What will information technology look like a decade from now?

When I was younger, I felt little if anything was predictable in technology. Who could predict that a Netscape would enable an Amazon, but then die, while Amazon became a datacenter-for-rent provider? That Microsoft would lose its anti-trust trial but could continue just as before? That the supposedly dead-end “search” category would spawn a Google? That HTML has taken over how to build user interfaces, on-line and off-line?

Of course, these specific events can’t be predicted; too many random events make this impossible, such as whether or not Jim Barksdale happens to meet Marc Andreessen.

But I feel now that many other things can be predicted rather well. For example, 10 years ago it would have been rather clear what the approximate specifications of one of today’s gaming PCs would look like (CPU instructions per second, memory, graphics card abilities, network connectivity etc.) That, in turn, could have allowed us to predict rather well that internet-connected shoot-them-up games with full 3-D animation, played against others on the internet, would be very successful. We would not have known who would make the games, what exact features they would have, and perhaps not that in-game merchandise would be big business. But that 3-D shoot-them-up games would be a big category was virtually certain.

Now, at the start of the 2010s, this seems to be a good time to try and see what I can predict about this coming decade. I need to do that for my own purposes anyway to figure out the timing and the shape of certain events related to my business.

To make this interesting, I’m going to attempt to predict how information technology is going to look a full 10 years from now, in 2020, and how we get there. I’m not expecting to go into terrible detail, but want to cover all elements of the stack from hardware and communications to software infrastructure, some end-user features and all the way to their governance. It seems unavoidable that some of it might veer off into the political and societal; in 2020, technology will have an even more central role in everybody’s lives. Sounds like a handful? Yes, but everything is connected, and it seems rather impossible to cut off a smaller piece and still say something interesting.

I might embarrass myself terribly. I might not have anything to say that others consider interesting. But I hope that at the very least, some people will comment and we can have an intelligent conversation and a good time. I’m hoping for a journey into what we can attempt to predict but what is still unknown, gradually unfolding itself as we all help build it. Better than any 3-D full-immersion game regardless with how many MIPS!

So, welcome aboard!