Baby New Year has opened his eyes, and he sees a bright future for the developer community. Of course, newborn babies can’t focus beyond a few inches, so I’d take that with a grain of salt. Some of us are a little longer in the tooth, so this week, I’ll try to peer out into the months ahead and take my best guess as to what we can expect in 2012. You can come back in December and laugh hysterically at my predictions.
It’s all about the mobile
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. The intellectual property litigation mayhem that we saw in 2011 will continue unabated in the new year. Now that several vendors have implemented the nuclear option by suing their competitors, the fun and games can only get more intense as companies use local judicial systems and trade organizations as a way to keep competing products out of markets.
On the Android front, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) is starting to show up on handsets, but depressingly few if you’re an Android developer hoping to use the new features of the release. There’s no word if there will be a follow-on to ICS anytime soon, which is probably a good thing, given how far behind handset makers are in getting recent releases onto their shipping products.
Fans of iOS can look forward to at least one new iPhone and iPad (if not more) in 2012, as well as iOS 6. We’ll probably see the end-of-life for the iPhone 3 family since only the 3GS made it onto the iOS 5 supported list, and another year will have past. Rumors abound that there will be an integrated TV option for iOS as well — whether it will allow apps to be installed is a question mark at the moment. Siri on your TV could be fairly awesome; imagine just saying, “Record all new Patriots games” and having it happen.
The BlackBerry appears to be singing its swan song while those pesky P2ME feature phones continue to own much of the low-end cell phone market. The biggest unknown this year is if the Windows Phone platform will finally gain significant traction. Nokia and Microsoft are spending a boatload of money to promote it. They have the resources to buy market share if they want, and recent reviews of new Windows Phone devices have actually been pretty positive. The question would be, who would Microsoft steal market share from — Apple, Android or the low-end phones?
Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.
Clouds are gathering on the horizon
Much as the Internet rapidly gained mindshare in the early ’90s, the cloud has now become the hot new concept that the general public grasps, at least in principle. What exactly the cloud is tends to depend on who you talk to, but the general idea of moving desktop applications to HTML5-based web applications is a done deal at this point.
The one big wrench in the plan could come from the legislative branches of the world. The more they pass SOPA-like laws, the more people are going to worry about how easily they could lose access to their private data if they move it to the cloud. It was bad enough when you had to trust Google not to be evil; expecting elected representatives to be evil is almost a given.
The increasing move to the cloud is only going to heat up demand for developers who know HTML5, jQuery, PHP, and other web-based technologies. At least in the short run, it’s going to be a good time to be a web developer.
Offshoring loses its cachet
The stampede to move development jobs overseas seems to have encountered a roadblock, and many U.S. companies appear to be rethinking the economics of outsourcing projects. Some startups are trying new and innovative (and potentially insane) schemes to work around U.S. labor laws, and while this is unlikely to bring back the go-go days of the late ’90s — when developers were courted like rock stars — it may perhaps stem the hemorrhaging of skilled jobs overseas. The challenge for the U.S. will be to produce enough high-tech workers to fill all those returning jobs, especially as more and more high school students rethink the economics of going to college.
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