Predictions for 2007 (and beyond?)

Never done a prediction list before (officially), but I want to archive my predictions in order to review them at the end of the year and see how close I get.
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1. The earth will get warmer than before, yup - we are heating up. There will be even more evidence that humans play a big hand, and there will be many who will doubt/deny/question it. London will have another 40c day.
For some scientific and serious discussion - http://www.realclimate.org

2. The drought will finally break (Melbourne, Australia) between Feb - Jun'07.

3. Oil price will continue to climb. It will be > US$75 by Dec'07.

And now for some technology stuff::

4. Windows Vista will slowly start to seep into the developed world. Developers using the .NET framework will the first lot to move over, the rest will very slowly move over the next 3-5 years. Windows will continue to have security issues.

5. Linux will start to gain a lot more traction, with increased usage coming from South America and Asia. Device manufacturers will start to adopt it in greater numbers.

6. Apple will release a product line to start taking over the living rooms and are very likely to actually succeed. Most likely a Mac TV with the ability to save TV shows, go online and play simple games. It will be easy to use and very likely going to be a huge hit. They will grow their slice of the computer market.

7. The new Microsoft Office will most likely not gain much adoption this year (or the next for that matter).

8. 2007 will be the year that web applications extend their reach. Google will release a plug-in (or some technical module) that will allow GMail and their Word processing/Spreadsheet applications to work offline. This will start off a new revolution -- and a lot of clones will start off.
- Image processing applications will start to go web based (Maybe not to the quality and richness of photoshop, but they will hit the 80-20 rule without much effort this year).
- There will be attempts made at creating a completely online IDE. If you can have a word processor online, why not an IDE. This will be year the web application development will start to shift gears. Once the IDE shifts to a server, the whole deployment game will change as well. [The question is, will Google, Yahoo or Amazon release an IDE that will allow you to build applications to run in their infrastructure -- I hope so, it will be one of the biggest changes to the way we buil software in a long while]
- Assembling web applications using web-components will start to get a bit easier.

9. Offshoring and Outsourcing will turn around and the local development fad starts.

10. Custom software development starts to slow down for most business applications. It is now all about crafting a solution using existing technologies/components quickly. Integration, customization and selective enhancement will be the new buzz words.

** Personally, I hope #8 is spot-on and #3 is totally wrong.

-- Rajesh

Should the head chef know how to cook?

Been catching up with a few old contacts over the many X-Mas lunches, a common theme seems to be how often I hear the words ... "if only the management understood software development", or "why would they appoint a team lead that has never programmed to lead developers?" and the classic .. "they hired 5 developers to create system X, and they are still arguing what X is!" (i.e. they hired well compensated contractors to surf the web).

This phenomenon seems to be quite common in large organizations whose primary business is not software (as in banks, retail..). I guess the senior management in these businesses does not really understand software or the people that tend to build software well.

In other words .. would you appoint a head chef that does not know how to cook? A bank would not do well in the cooking business, so why should they be good at software development.

In all fairness, most large non-IT organizations do tend to outsource their entire IT work to larger IT specialists (with nifty 3 letter acronyms). But, you still need to set the direction and control the army that you just hired.