I just came across some business technology predictions I made in 2008. Let's see how I did eight years later and highlight what else is trending today.
My first prediction back in '08 was that Google would succeed in stealing away some corporate IT market share from Microsoft. I said Gmail would take the place of Microsoft's Exchange in many businesses.
In a recent analysis of 40,000 public companies' email server addresses, Gartner Research found 13 percent lead back to Microsoft or Google cloud email services. Of the two, Microsoft accounted for 8.5 percent of firms, through Microsoft Office 365, while Google Apps for Work had 5 percent.The rest used conventional on-premise email applications, or a mix of hybrid, hosted or private cloud services managed by smaller vendors, according to the report.
Partly cloudy with a chance of data
The whole "cloud computing" thing was beginning to bud in 2008, and is in full bloom today, with massive data centers and rows of servers to handle software for thousands of users. As I wrote in 2008, "In the future, we won't care who owns or operates our software, we will just use it over the Internet." That same article noted the trend toward "greater portability" — an attribute fed by dozens of innovations such as lighter, longer-lasting batteries, extra data capacity, better WiFi, greater bandwidth and faster processors.
Another pretty cool prediction I made eight years back was that "bandwidth costs and equipment costs will keep coming down until watching TV on your phone is practically free, if you agree to view a few ads now and then." Hulu, anyone?
Cutting back on wires
In homes and offices, the days of everything having to connect to a wire or cable were beginning to end in 2008. Wireless networks are now everywhere, connecting desktops, laptops, notebook computers and tablets to the Internet and to each other, not to forget Wi-Fi enabled printers.
Then there's the poorly named voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP), which was just starting to sell in '08. VoIP now has taken over what used to be "long distance" and made it practically free. The digitized voice signal can be processed in many ways, including having it read back to you by your computer.
Mobile
The "beacon" will probably startle me the first few times it alerts me to a restaurant or other venue as I wander urban streets. I'll get used to it: Location marketing is a hot trend.
Facebook gives Bluetooth beacons to willing stores and restaurants that enables them to beam out promotional messages, recipes or whatever to passing cellphones. And while we're speaking of smartphones, use yours to look at your company's website — it had better not appear in miniature with unreadable small type — unless somebody lost the memo that said you've got to have a phone-compatible version of your website available these days or Google will rate you lower in searches.
Analytics
You'll be much better able to analyze what's going on in terms of visits to your website, click-throughs and sales, because richer and richer data on who is surfing the 'net the hardest can lead to more targeted sales campaigns. Many sites are looking at getting faster page-load times, to the point where Google calls the effort Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP HTML).
Finally, now that everything is becoming digitized, you can be in complete charge of when and where you see movies, spreadsheets, photos, videos, music, you name it. All can be streamed out to you over the Internet to any of your devices, as needed, and stored and played back at will.
Today in business, information can be where you need it, when you need it. That should continue to make us all the more productive as we are all the better informed.
