My predictions for IT in year 2005

Technology predictions are always worthless, but they can be fun. Plus, predictions on a blog tend to stay around and so people can check back on them.

• The home PC market will keeping declining and by the end of 2005, a new architecture will seriously threaten the PC for home web surfing, email and instant messaging. There will be serious talk of replacing the PC-on-every-desk model in many companies. Maybe Microsoft will be pushing an XBox2-Pro for business use.
• Videoconference-type broadband will still be out-of-reach for most home users and most small and medium businesses.
• Whatever the big thing in IT is, it will have to do with storage. Job prospects in large cities will improve significantly for IT workers in 2005 and the growth will be driven by the new possibilities offered by infinite permanent storage. They will be significantly more data warehousing at the end of 2005 especially in smaller companies.
• Google will still be the most interesting Web company at the end of 2005. They will still be seen as a potent competitor for Microsoft.
• The Semantic Web will still be mostly at the same point it is now, at the end of 2005. That is, some nice ideas, including RDF and XML will stick around and find some uses, but OWL won’t take off.
• The Web will keep evolving. Personalisation will be a big thing: while the Web is now seen as a static graph on which people navigate, we will start seeing the Web as a graph around people. Social software will keep growing and growing in importance and won’t be based on ontologies or any such rigid model. New forms and models of recommender systems will emerge.
• Security will be a big thing in 2005 as it was in 2004, but we won’t make significant progress. People will install critically insecure software and they won’t care; or else, they will keep locking everything down.
• eLearning in universities will keep on growing and we’ll have significantly more online courses offered by the end of 2005, though the push will come from students and deans, and not so much from Faculty members.
• eLearning outside universities may grow out of the PowerPoint or Flash models, but if so, only because some cool new technology, maybe based on XML, makes it possible.
• Year 2005 will be the year where the parallelization of systems and algorithms will become ubiquitous because of changes in CPUs.

Ok, most of those predictions may sound obvious. Well, what are your predictions?