Technology Predictions for 2005 - read those of Daniel Lemire and add yours

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Fri, 12/31/2004 - 11:10.

Here's an interesting posting of 2005 technology predictions from a Université du Québec (Montréal) professor, Daniel Lemire, which are insightful. NEO will be well served with some IT visioning and knowing of developments to expect in the coming year and beyond. Of greatest interest to "REALNEO users", from Lemire, is probably "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"
... all of which is part of the REALNEO vision. Read on, and add your predications as comments or pages to this...

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
    pusing 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?