Photo by eir@siLast year around this time i posted a blog with predictions. Let’s see if I got it right…

Windows 7 came and was an instant hit. I didn’t think things would move so fast. I guess people were more fed up with Vista then I expected.

The so called Standards conforming Internet Explorer 8 wasn’t the revolution I hoped. In fact, it’s definitely still an Internet Explorer, bulky, slow etc. It does however have multiple processes for different tabs which is good. Unfortunately this eats away memory like nothing I saw before. I still only use IE8 when I absolutely have to (which is that pesky time registration thingy)

I predicted shake-out-time for social media sites. This ‘kinda’ happened as many small sites have been either bought by larger ones or just discontinued. Remember Pownce, Sezwho, IwantSandy? Still I think there are way too many left. Recently both Friendfeed and Ping.fm have been bought and news is out that MyBlogLog will stop.

I wrote about what I have previously called web 4.0. I didn’t expect it to happen and it didn’t. full points on that one. But what about the reason. I wrote that lack of interoperability is still the same (very) big problem as it was last year. I haven’t really seen any big improvements in this area. The only positive thing here is the increased amounts of talk about this subject. That’s a good thing.

Not being economically inclined I had a go at predicting a little bit about the economical crisis. I wasn’t that optimistic and I guess I was right. Now don’t tell me about the stock exchanges and the large numbers we hear every day, these are just measurements of emotion. If you truly look at it, it’s still the government backing that holds up much of the economy. If the government as much as mention the possibility of stopping that support, everybody panics. It’s no good yet and won’t be for some time, even though those who are heavily into the hot-air business of stocks and loans are making money at this time. Unfortunately I don’t think the system will change either. Those with judicial and economical backgrounds still rule the world, rather than engineers and technicians who actually know how things work…

Yep, the other crisis is still here too. Unfortunately we didn’t really work that hard to solve that one compared to the financial crisis. We failed dramatically in Copenhagen, we cut budgets for innovation and research and real changes to support different forms of transport and energy haven’t moved any nearer in the last year. Lots of words, yeah, lots of them, but not really any bananas…

It is nice to see that Open Source Software slowly becomes mainstream. In the e-government area where I frequently work it is becoming very prevalent. OpenOffice.org, Apache, Alfresco, Mysql, Tomcat, Freemind… Many products that I see being used around me in real business settings. This year also has shown – at least in the Netherlands – a lot of discussion about how to deal with Open Source Software in the process of acquiring new software by organisations. This is proving to be rather complex as the organization needs to change their habitual prerequisites and requirements on companies, licenses and support. There have been some useful publications on this area that help organisations along which is definitely a good thing.

This year for the first time there was a lot of attention to greener data-centers and energy efficient IT solutions. This is something new and it’s about time. I expected this to come last year and it did. We’re not there yet, a lot has to be done still, but progress has been made.

I wrote about virtualization as well. This has become so mainstream that hardly anyone is talking about it anymore. That’s pretty scary. If things become mainstream, they tend to draw the attention of the not so pleasant people of this world. I expected problems, they haven’t happened yet. There are no VMWare RootKits, Blue-Pill like trojans or VirtualViruses. I don’t however think that this is the result of the amazing security measures taken by consultants implementing these technologies, rather I think we’re just lucky…

Concluding this post, there isn’t really a clear outcome. Some things happened the way I thought, some didn’t. At least I wasn’t completely besides the truth-to-be. It’s quite interesting to see how some of these subjects will continue to develop in this year.

Don’t hesitate to comment!

Related posts…

• Right or Wrong
• 2010 will bring…
• Explained on Youtube
• Let’s do a few predictions…