From the fate of Vista to social networking in smaller businesses to green tech, bMighty collects the top technology predictions for the new year
Making predictions has always been a risky business, and with the Internet's ability to record those prognostications in perpetuity, it's now downright dangerous. But having a good sense of the top tech trends can help IT managers in smaller companies figure out where to put their energies and, more significantly, their technology investments.
Of course, prognosticators do get it wrong sometimes -- the few businesses that invested in the Apple Lisa can tell you that -- but by sifting through the myriad of 2008 prediction lists that are out there, we have managed to cobble together a list of tech trends that appear to be on their way to making a mark in the industry.
Is This The Year to Dump Microsoft?
The introduction of Vista this past year was supposed to create more upheaval than it actually did. Is it still inevitable that smaller businesses will mostly go Vista this year?
PC World thinks '08 is the year Linux gets some real attention in the business world. It writes: "As Vista continues to limp toward wider adoption, Linux will make major inroads into the enterprise, as well as in government IT."
Vista will also make some people over at Apple happy this year. According to InformationWeek's tech predictions for 2008, Microsoft's new operating system "has largely been a nonevent in many corporations. Many have held off on any wholesale migration to the new operating system, instead sticking with XP or even moving to the Mac OS. While Vista made good on its promises to rewrite the kernel and deliver a new security model, it has suffered from a lack of compatible applications and its own collection of security issues." InformationWeek quotes Dan O'Donnell, collaboration administrator at Rand Corp., who says, "The relative lack of Windows security isn't something that Apple caused, but clearly they are benefiting from it."
Dan Frakes of Macworld also predicts that this is the year Mac enters the enterprise in a big way. He writes: "The debut of Leopard, along with a general dissatisfaction with Windows Vista, will open doors for the Mac in the enterprise market. In fact, we'll see a few major U.S. companies switch to the Mac platform -- some gradually, but at least a couple in a major public migration. We'll also see a resurgence of the Mac platform in higher education."
As Microsoft fends off open source from one side and Apple from the other, others see online office suites finally becoming a real contender to Office. Wired goes so far as to predict the "Fall of Office." It continues: "Five years ago it would have been impossible to imagine that Microsoft could ever play the underdog, but roles are changing rapidly, thanks to the improvement and availability of free, web-based office software. Now an increasing number of people are flocking to free office suites, whether those are traditional desktop-software suites like Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice.org or completely online, web-based apps like Google Docs. And although Google Docs is still somewhat primitive, it's the first major reimagining of the productivity-software suite since Microsoft first bundled Word and Excel -- and that's why we think it's going to make major waves in 2008."
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