John M. Hoyt’s IT Predictions for 2011

Everyone else has been making their predictions for the coming year, so I thought I might do the same…

These predictions are based upon industry news, social media and blog rambling as well as some personal wishes.

Will any of it come to fruition? I guess at the end of 2011 you can remind me how wrong I was.

A few IT Predictions for 2011:

• Google Android based devices will continue to dominate the market in smartphones, pads, and everything else from alarm clocks and personal weather stations to set top boxes.

• Wireless carriers will discover that loading their own “value added” bundled software on top of the phones they sell is really a turn off and that keeping the smartphone just as the manufacturer and OS provider intended it to be will enable a faster rollout of updates and make for happier customers.

• Dish, DirecTV & cable TV providers have a fight on their hands… Services like Netflix and a whole slew of streaming providers will fight to bring first run movies, and streaming of networks via the internet. We will see many new set top boxes, TVs with built-in streaming capability. The most exciting thing will be an the legal battles around this, not really the technology itself.

• Tablet and pad wars will continue. Apple’s iPad II will provide some stiff competition for the Android pads, but be prepared for Android based pads to spring up everywhere as more are cleared for import to the USA.

• Internet Tax? Yep, 2011 is the year. So much revenue is being lost that I predict we will see taxes placed on our online purchases. I believe it will be both good and bad. Some online retailers may no longer be able to beat out the local brick and mortar prices, so that could be good for us smaller guys, but it may slow down the injection of money into the economy. Either way, it’s coming.

• Cloud Computing: Over half of all businesses will look into using cloud based services, whether it is online storage, online backup, online applications like Microsoft BPOS or Google Apps, hosted anti-virus, hosted anti-spam or even hosted VoIP solutions. Of these, 10% will actually make the switch, and half who do make the switch will be totally happy, with the other dissatisfied due to bandwidth or network reliabilty. The number of fully satisfied people will go up as the technology matures.

• Malicious software will affect more Macs and Linux based machines in 2011. We’ve already seen a sharp increase in the number of exploited machines, expect this trend to continue. Add to this smartphones as a target.

• Network Connectivity: Charter Business has just come out with a 75×5 meg Pro75 package. This is great, but I expect this to reach 100×10 by the end of 2011, possibly as a free upgrade like they upgraded the 20meg to 30meg…

What do you think the very near future has in store for us? More solid state storage devices? Hard Drives reaching 5TB?

Either way, we hope you have a very Happy New Year!