Bye 2006, Hi 2007 !

It is that time of the year when you want to look back and see what went well and what did not, and then speculate on what you expect of 2007. This is not an authoritarian review, but driven more by observation of what I have seen through the year and expect to see next year.

For the sake of simplicity and conciseness, I will list down only 3 top technology (IT) trends in 2006 and 2007.

Let's see what happened in 2006 - till date!

1. The biggest boom happened in the space of Web 2.0 based services. MySpace, Orkut, YouTube and all these websites grew leaps and bounds. With these kind of web services increasing their scale of operations, so did technology grow up to accomodate increasing richness in features that users demanded. Many legacy services ramped their websites to provide users a "widget"-ed look and feel. Users could customize the content delivery as per their preference and even choose their layouts.

2. RSS - You can almost say that RSS is the de-facto standard in syndicated content distribution. Even email clients have now integrated RSS feeds into their client tools. Yahoo Mail Beta is an example. Even Notes 8 is RSS friendly.

3. The age of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) driven business dawns. IBM's business strategy has also majorly aligned with the same paradigm. All major IT service companies are now looking at SOA-izing their businesses.

To list down the "also-noticed" stuff...
- Firefox (FX) gained more ground than the year beginning against its stiff competitor Internet Explorer (IE). IE7 was finally decoupled with Windows and released as a solo product. IE7 also incorporated a long standing must-have feature of tabbed browsing. However, FX got voted as a more secure and more crisp browsing experience than IE. FX launched the 2.0 version in October.
- VoIP is gaining more ground and is being dished out as a standard service, albeit within user community, by many messenger tools. VoIP is also gaining ground in telecom networks where calls are switched from a GSM/CDMA service to a WiFi based VoIP service seamlessly and vice versa.
- RIM (inventor of Blackberry) lost its lawsuit and had to pay heavy penalties. But, that has not detered people from picking up their devices and use their service (so much that a new medical term has arisen... blackberry thumb!). It is certainly cool to be connected to a Blackberry. In comparison, Palm OS was seen wilting down.

And now for 2007.

1. Open Document Format (ODF) will be more popular with widespread use, with a lot of productivity suites being built to cater to the ODF. Notes 8 comes bundled with IBM Productivity Suite that has integrated the ODF completely in its architecture.

2. India will become more WiFi than before. Broadband will be cheaper in India than elsewhere in the world. There may be no roads, but you would have broadband access at remote locations. Let us hope things really do not shape up like that. :-)

3. Software will become more granular than the monolithic model now. Meaning to say, you do not have to buy all the features of a product if you do not want to. Plugins will provide the additional features that you would need at different times. This is what SOA also propagates.

Also, some more trends on the side...
- Spending on security and privacy would increase. More and more users would choose and demand security and privacy over other eye-candy features.
- RSS will find strong competitors in Atom and some other formats that will be developed or are being developed. Google is working on one that is based on Atom.
- War of services will move from the grounds of personalized service to quality of service (QoS).
- This is too much to ask, but video calling could make an appearance in your cellphones (in India). Well, I am putting down a wishlist... :-)
- Only the companies that have a strong emphasis on Innovation and creating value for the end customers will stay in business and grow. Needless to add here, we all know how important Innovation is in IBM's scheme of things.

So, there. Let us see if 2007 shapes up like the way we have just put down.

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a great prosperous New Year 2007 ahead..!!