If you put together my 2011 predictions so far they create a world view of tech culture and business as I see it for the coming year. Each prediction builds on the others until we get to these last two, which present a couple boffo conclusions, the big question being “What does Apple need with a 500,000 (soon to be one million) square foot data center in rural North Carolina?”
First we have Apple working to kill small hard drives. We’ll shortly see Apple also killing optical drives in its notebooks. This is to save money, space, and weight, sure, but it is mainly to limit local storage. We need local storage, but Steve doesn’t want […]
If 2010 was the year of cloud computing that means 2011 is the year we’ll actually start using it in earnest. That further means 2011 will be the year that cloud computing lets us down. Everything in IT fails eventually, though the big myth is that won’t happen with cloud computing. Hogwash.
Microsoft isn’t going away, but they aren’t going to do a lot of things right in 2011, either. The company’s leadership is stuck, complacent, and just a bit thick. We’ve seen a lot of flux in the executive ranks reporting to CEO Steve Ballmer and I think that’s mainly because Ballmer won’t get out of the way. There is no upward mobility path so people leave. But don’t expect Ballmer to leave in 2011, either, which means more mediocrity. So Microsoft will continue to be a huge presence, but not feared in the industry the way they used to be. They’ve become the new IBM.
This is a sad one. Venerable Yahoo, the original web portal, is in such trouble that it doesn’t know what to do. So Yahoo will this year begin tearing itself apart.
This year will see the end of the iPod Classic and with it the 1.8-inch disk drive, 90 percent of which are sold by Toshiba. This is a testament to the rise of flash memory and Solid State Disk (SSD) drives, but that’s not the only cause or the only result, because I predict that late in the year the venerable 3.5-inch disk form factor will hit end-of-life, too.
