According to Gartner’s predictions, by 2012, 50% of traveling workers will leave their notebooks at home in favor of other devices such as iPad, Tablets, and Smartphones.
By 2012, 80% of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology. Many open-source technologies are mature, stable and well supported. Open Source is here to stay. Such as: specific applications such as Gimp (GIMP.ORG) which are now contenders for the commercial market. Look at the CRM market for good open source examples.
By 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of as product license (SaaS). The web will allow SaaS providers to compete worldwide against established players. Cloud computing & SaaS will be a big push this year – Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, etc are all moving in that directions. I think this will be big for development projects – many organizations will be showing Proof of Concepts with it — and it offers an option to crowded data centers. This type of development will go in conjunction with the changing view of Desktop platforms to the new alternative devices.
Personally, I don’t subscribe to Gartner’s views since they get it close 33% of the time. The OSS trend has been happening for 10 years now, the mobile trend has been visible for some 3-4 years now, and the service oriented trend has been visible for some 8 years now. They have little forward thinking.
In my opinion right now the trend is towards mobile. If you are a developer and you are not developing your application to run on mobile devices, you are behind. IOS, Android, Mac OSX, and Linux are the targets developers need to focus upon.
The next top trend is HTML5 which lends itself to the cross-platform need above. HTML5 still has a fair amount of shortcomings from a consumer perspective, but will solve those when the applications truly require the missing functionality.
Finally, the consumer markets are hot. Enterprise business continues to trudge along, but if you look around consumerization is everywhere.
So in summary, the trends are mobile/cross platform, HTML5/CSS3, and consumer focused software.
One last moment to think about. The software market is changing rapidly, a far faster pace than Moore’s law predicts. Hardware is also changing rapidly – ARM has changed the mobile industry and is about to change a lot more in the coming months. Software developers need to be looking much further ahead than Gartner just to keep up.
Another great post! Really can’t wait for more!
One interesting aspect of the whole laptop/tablet/cell phone market that I find interesting is how convergence is not happening. I often see people with an iPAD, a book reader (Kindle or Nook) and a cell phone. I am typing this on an old laptop in a Starbucks. Most people are using laptops. My son has all of the above devices. The tablets are nice, but they aren’t the best for reading books it the comments I have heard are correct. The e-readers also weigh about half as much as the iPAD and are easier to carry. The iPAD does some really nice stuff, but the question is, is it really useful stuff? But, like I said, I don’t see the promised convergence of devices that the pubdits like Gartner talked about. I did see a large man with what I thought was a very small computer at a vendor event yesterday. It turned out to be an iPAD in a docking device with keyboard. Cool.
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This post is direct to the point, mobile and cloud is the future and there is jungle law kinda balance required between open source and commercial apps, Actually today the meaning of open source is that to take out money indirectly is what they call open source. Mobile market is bifurcating into html5 and native apps perhaps you would also like tow write next article on profitability on mobile app market