Credit: Galen Gruman/IDG
Last week, I gave you some things to worry about for 2018. This week, as we look forward to the Thanksgiving holiday, as is my tradition, I want to share the things you can rest easy about in the coming year—many because they’re just not going to happen.
Honestly, 2017 was a bit of a snoozer in technology, so 2018 can’t help but be more disruptive. But not that much more.
Worry No. 1 to set aside: Buying a VR headset
Don’t worry that everyone is talking about VR headsets. Aside from a few video games, only the worst kind of hipsters are going to walk around looking stupid with these kind of things. Remember 3D TVs? Same deal here: No one wants to wear glasses if they don’t have to. (In other words, don’t be a glasshole.)
Worry No. 2 to set aside: The cloud eating the world
While the rate of adoption is accelerating, I’m going to call BS on the analyst figures about cloud growth. Ominous statements like 92 percent of enterprises will be on the cloud by 2020 or that 70 percent are already there are the kind of wishful thinking from industry participants.
I’m not saying to sit on your hands, but this is still an ongoing process and we won’t be anywhere near done in three years. I also doubt the adoption will ever be 92 percent. There are some things that are just safer where they are.
Worry No. 3 to set aside: 8K video
Once again, you still don’t need to think about this unless you’re an IMAX theater. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is going to give Comcast and Verizon little motivation to up network speeds that the next level of video resolution would require. Plus, the screens are still priced for those jerkoffs with more money than sense. And most people are still not up to 4K yet.
Worry No. 4 to set aside: CloudFoundry going away
I’ll eat my words on this. CloudFoundry is hot, because large companies are looking for a strategy that lets them manage systems and because no one wants to be held hostage to one cloud provider. CloudFoundry is well positioned and seems to be taking advantage of that position. I’ve not seen evidence that any other similar public/private PaaS solution is competitive.
Worry No. 5 to set aside: Sales of $1,000 phones
The truth is that people will pay $1,000 for a status phone. The iPhone and Galaxy S people will still upgrade, even though $1,000 is the new top-end phone price. Get over it: If you’ve been paying $600 to $800 for a phone, you’ll pay $1,000. Prediction: They’ll be testing $1,200 soon.
Worry No. 6 to set aside: Driverless cars
Although people are afraid of driverless cars, unless you live in certain areas you’re unlikely to run into them—figuratively or literally. There will be accidents, even fatalities, but driverless cars will likely be safer than cars driven by those meat-computers above our shoulders. Once driverless cars are widespread you’ll still be more likely to be killed by a driver from New Jersey. Seriously, New Jersey shouldn’t be allowed to issue driver’s licenses (no offense).
Worry No. 7 to set aside: Having to use Snapchat
Thankfully, Snapchat isn’t going to become a social network thing you don’t want to do but have to do for some kind of professional or important social reason. Snapchat’s earnings (umm, loss) and usage statistics have all the signs of it being the next Friendster or Google Plus. I for one am ready to not see any more people with puppy ears.
Worry No. 8 to set aside: Using Spark in production
Apache Spark has been ready for production for a while. This is not to say there aren’t warts and problems, but I mean you run Oracle in production and that things is as operationally sound as an abused child; you just got good at dealing with it. The same will be true with Spark.
Worry No. 9 to set aside: Your RDBMS
Sure, you may use MongoDB or some other newfangled database, but your RDBMS isn’t going away. It turns out that joins are still pretty useful. Eventually, the newfangled databases will integrate more distributed scale-out features, so you’ll pay a higher premium for them. In general, costs are going up here anyhow; if you’ve bought an enterprise license for a NoSQL product recently, you’ve discovered this. So even more reason to keep your RDBMS.
Worry No. 10 to set aside: Digital transformation
“Digital transformation” isn’t happening this year. Research says that most CIOs have a plan but no plan to implement it. Key to this is that many companies haven’t really updated the way they find what they already have. As I know from my work at a search company, search is really the first step of digital transformation. If you spike the ball on modernizing your search strategy and technology, your digital transformation is unimplementable.
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