Reno Web Design Blog

Digital Delirium 2011 predictions for Facebook, tablets and Cloud services

• 29/01/11
• 0 Comments
• Permalink

2010 has been an interesting year not only for Digital Delirium but for technology and social media as well.

While technology slowed, social media exploded. Who could have guessed Mark Zuckerberg would become Time’s person of the year?

I will look into the coming year and predict some continuing technological trends which will affect how we use the internet.

There have been three major trends in 2010 when it comes to the internet and personal computer technology in general.

1: Social Media

2: Tablet Computing

3: Cloud Computing

Social Media

There were two main players in the social media game of 2010: Facebook and Twitter. It’s obvious the big winner was Facebook.  In some way I see Facebook to be a 2010 version of the old giant portals that were popular in the 90’s. Remember when AOL was the must have portal? Facebook is now offering the same kind of central controlled area with similar functionalities of the older portals.

Obviously there is more to the success of Facebook then just offering one big central portal area for users. Zuckerberg’s real genus is in his grasp of what social media means and what users want. Zuckerberg seems to instinctively understand social media and has the intellectual, technological and now deep financial resources to keep Facebook from growing stale.

Knowing what users want is not easy. Google learned this the hard way in 2010 with their regrettably named WAVE service which lasted for no more than a year. The problem with WAVE was that it was advertized as a file sharing service that just happen to include other features. Who would have guessed file sharing is not as popular as sharing web links and funny photos?

For all of Facebook’s success I predict dark clouds hovering in its future. Just like AOL and Yahoo there is a dichotomy in trying to get more and more people to your portal by offering more and more different type of services while maintaining a easy to use site without the bloat that could come with multi services. Some will want to keep Facebook simple to use, while others will want it to continue to offer more and more functionality; in the end will it will have to please everyone or will see a dropping off of users just as the old portals did. 

Some technology pundits feel its large size will protect Facebook from competition. But this didn’t protect AOL, Yahoo or MySpace. However you could argue that none of these services got up to half a billion users and did not fully understand what they had like Zuckerberg does now.

There are three questions that come up in my mind:

1. Can Facebook stop the temptation of adding more and more none social media functionality to its social media portal in order to keep it from bloating?

2. Can Facebook increase its membership without adding additional non-social media functionality?

3. Can Facebook keep its private investors happy with more growth without more bloat?

I predict Facebook will have continued success in early 2011 though by the end of the year we may see the first signs of internal problems of trying to please everyone. I for one am looking forward to his next move.  Facebook will be used more and more as a main source of audience communication. Companies who do not have a Facebook page will lose out on a valuable marketing and media tool.

Tablet Computers

2011 will be the year of tablets. Apple has had a huge success with the iPad in 2010 having sold between 10 and 16 million units.

I predict we will see an even bigger explosion of different types of computer tablets. The 2011 Consumer Electronic show saw many different types of tablets but almost all were powered by Goggle Android OS Honeycomb. The surprise hit was Motorola’s Xoom tablet which won best in show despite not being available to play with. A video presentation was all that was needed to get people excited. 

Another surprise hit at the Electronic show was BlackBerry’s Playbook , which will be shipping in the first quarter of 2011. The really interesting thing about this tablet apart from the great hardware is that RIM is running this tablet with its own OS called QNX (read the  reviews here).

I feel Samsung will come out on top of the tablet market. They have already shown their skills in this sector with the Galaxy during 2010, plus they have the manufacturing abilities to build products as needed to meet demand. Most of the other big manufactures have bottlenecked at key points of their tablet manufacturing processes, which may limit them in 2011.

Let’s consider what HP is going to be doing with its 2010 purchase of Palm for 1.2 billion dollars. With this purchase HP now has access to Palm’s great tablet operating system webOS.

Many technology pundits are saying that HP will have up to 3 different tablet models running on Palm’s webOS in 2011. If HP can release products in 2011 using webOS I predict it could be one of the big winners in the 2011 tablet market.

What is Microsoft planning to do in this market in 2011? It must be quite frustrating for Microsoft to see the success that Apple and Google are having with tablets, being that tablet computers were its founder Bill Gates pet project for much of the 90’s. Using XP and Vista turned out to be a real disaster with poor battery life, slow processing speeds and let’s face it, using them was painful! This killed the tablet market in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

 Many people thought that Microsoft would be using their successful  Window's Phone 7 operating system on their new tablets as quickly as possible and we would be seeing a flood of these devices in the middle or end of 2011. However, Microsoft decided to use a watered down and highly modified version of its new main OS Windows 8. That’s right, Windows 8, which won’t be available to the public until probably the end of the first part of 2012. In the mean time it plans to offer hardware-manufacturing partners a highly modified version of its existing OS Windows 7 for their 2011 tablets offerings.

 I predict that this approach will be a big mistake. This was probably one of the reasons why HP decided to buy Palm in 2010. It could see almost two years of Apple and Google completely dominating the market place if it stuck with its traditional OS partner Microsoft.

I predict this is going to be the big issue that brings Bill Gates back to Microsoft in 2011. Under the control of Steve Ballmer, Microsoft has had great success with Windows 7, Office 2010 and the launch Window's Phone 7. Windows 7 help turn around the disaster of Vista. Of course we did see Microsoft 6.5 a real dog of a mobile operating system. So under Ballmer Microsoft 2010 has been able to turn disaster into success. However, where is the general technology leadership?

As successful as Ballmer was with Microsoft in 2010, he seems to be adrift when it comes to tablets and how the company is going to deal with its relationship with their leading industry hardware partner Intel. Also, there is the bigger problem, which I’m going to discuss in more detail in the next section, called Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing

In a world where we now have powerful computer devises in our pockets and can have different computing devices, I call them “smart devices,” around your home and office, cloud computing has becomes a more and more attractive idea in 2010.

The biggest player who is committed to the idea of cloud computing is Google. Microsoft seems to keep improving its own online versions of its Office products, however being that the normal desktop product is one of its key money making machines, it is in a difficult situation as cloud computing is what the public is asking for. Microsoft will have to do more than update its desktop products if it wants to continue to compete with cloud services.

I can’t ever really see Microsoft being a real mover and shaker in this area unless Bill Gates comes back to run Microsoft in 2011. I could be wrong about this being that Microsoft’s Office still has the best document and spreadsheet applications on the market. Google’s online applications are good; however they still don’t have the fundamental power and flexibility of Microsoft Office. Some of the big questions that probably will become clearer or completely answered by the end of 2011 are:

1.Can Google really improve its online office products?

2.Can wireless technology be extended and made cheaper so almost everybody in the US can have excess to cloud computing?

3.Will Microsoft be forced to get real with its cloud products in 2011?

I can only see the future of computing being in the cloud services since in the coming years we will be using multiple computing devices that demand this type of service.

So there you have it, my predictions for 2011. Facebook will go through some growing pains but continue to dominate how we communicate. Tablets will be the devices to have and cloud computing services will force big changes to Microsoft’s management.

Back to the blog list.

Comments

Be the first to post a comment!

Add Comment

Commenting is not available in this channel entry.