2012 predictions

Unlike other years, where I wrote my "predictions" entry at the end of the year, this time I'm going to try to predict what is going to happen in a few technology areas in 2012. Oh yes, another not so database centric post. Well, it does have some database content. Read on.

First, I don't believe in the "the year of...." idea. At least applied to technology, it does not make much sense. There has not been a "year of Facebook", "year of Windows Server", "year of Lotus", "year of Office", "year of Novell" or "year of Google". We have never had a "year of Oracle", "year of SQL Server" or even a "year of iPad". True, some of these products have been very successful at launch time, reaching quickly a lot of popularity. Some people tend to take these launch dates as inflection points in tendencies, but they tend to forget how strongly have keep growing over time. No successful product I can think of -and correct me if I'm wrong- has been launched, ignored for a long while, and then boomed.

So don't expect these predictions to say "2012 will be the year of..." because 2012 will not be the year of anything. But in my opinion, 2012 will be the year when we will see some technologies emerging and others starting to disappear in the sunset.

MySQL share will go down. Oracle has failed to keep the hearts and minds of database developers. As a product, MySQL has nearly an infinite life span ahead, giving its huge momentum. But don't expect to be at the forefront of innovation. Unless Oracle as a company becomes something completely different from what Oracle is today, MySQL is going to remain the cheap SQL Server alternative, because everything else implies a threat to their other profit lines.

Java will finally start to lose momentum. Again, Oracle has to change a lot from what is today for this not to happen. From what I read about the evolution of the language, and the attempts to revive the ill fated JavaFX, Java is stagnating and becoming a legacy language. Notice I say momentum, not market share. During next year, less and less new projects starting from scratch will use Java, but that at the moment that is a small blip in the radar.

Windows Phone will have an agressive marketing push in 2012. Windows Phone will fail, crushed by the brand superiority of Apple and the massive spread of Android to... everywhere else.

Windows will become legacy. Yes, Windows 7 is not bad. Windows Server 2008 is not bad. But both are sandwiched in their respective niches. New client technologies (tablets, phones) are challenging the old king of the desktop. And in the server front, the combination of Cloud/SaaS growth and commoditization of basic enterprise services is challenging its dominance. Expect to see more and more integration with Active Directory trying to compensate for the lack of flexibility and higher costs of running your on premise Windows farms. Whereas the current Windows shops do not even question themselves if they should deploy new Windows servers or services, at the end of 2012, it will be customary to do so.

Speaking of Apple, 2012 will be the year when tablet manufacturers finally realize that they cannot compete offering something that is not quite as good as the competition but at the same price. So we'll hopefully see new products that offer innovative features while at the same time are -gasp- cheaper than the Apple equivalents. By the way, Apple will continue to be the stellar example of technology company, money making machine, marketing brilliance and stock market darling at the same time.

PostrgreSQL will increase market share. Both as a consequence of its own improvements, which make it more and more competitive with high end offerings, and because of Oracle not managing well its MySQL property, PostgreSQL will become more and more a mainstream choice. Many think it is already.

JVM based languages will flourish. While Java as a language is stalling, alternative languages that generate JVM bytecode will accelerate growth in 2012. The JVM is mature, runs under everything relevant from Windows to mainframes, and is a stable enough spec that nobody, even Oracle, dares to even touch. This, together with the tons of legacy code you can interface with, makes the JVM an ideal vehicle for developing new programming languages. Seriously, who wants to implement again file streams, threads or memory mapped files?

Javascript will become the Flash of 2012. Mmmm... maybe this has already happened  since Flash has already retreated from the mobile front. Yes, Javascript is not the perfect programming language. But it is universally available, performs decently, and together with the latest HTML specs allows for much of what Flash was being used in the past.

NoSQL will finish its hype cycle and start to enter the mainstream stage. Instead of a small army of enthusiasts trying to use it for everything, the different NoSQL technologies will be viewed with a balanced approach.

The computer security industry will be in the spotlight in 2012. Not because there is going to be a higher or lower number of security related incidents next year, but because as an industry, computer security has expanded too far with too few supporting reasons beyond fear and panic. Forgive my simplification, but currently computer security amounts to a lot of checklists blindly applied, without rhyme or reason. Much like in real life, security needs to go beyond the one size fits all mentality and start considering risks in terms of its impact, likelihood and opportunity costs. Otherwise, be prepared to remember a 20 character password to access your corporate network.

Oh, and finally, and in spite of all the fear mongering, the world will not end in 2012. You will be reading these predictions a year from now and wonder how wrong this guy was.