In 2 years (ish):
- the majority of consumer bought machines (which will be laptops) will have SSD and not rotational media
- At the same time, servers with larger storage requirements will use disk as we once used tape.
- At least one Linux distributoin will be shipping with btrfs as default
- OpenSolaris will be looking interesting and not annoying to try out (a lot more “just work” and easy to get going).
- Unless Sun puts ZFS under a GPL compatible license so it can make it into the Linux kernel, it will become nothing more than a Solaris oddity as other file systems will have caught up (and possibly surpassed).
- There will be somebody developing a a MySQL compatible release based off Drizzle
- Somebody will have ported Drizzle back to Microsoft Windows… possibly Microsoft.
- X will still be used for graphics on Linux, although yet another project will start up to “replace X with something modern”, get a lot of press and then fail.
In 5 years:
- Apple will single handedly control 1/3rd the mobile phone market
- The other 2/3rds will be divided between Blackberry (small), Windows Mobile and Android.
- Linux desktop market share will be much higher than Apple’s
That’s all for now…
Sounds reasonable.
I predict that pretty much all your predictions will be wrong. Most predictors of technology adoption and advancement are off by an order of magnitude in timing.
The most obvious ones where your predictions will be off is the adoption of SSD (price) and Linux desktop market share (Linux developers will never “get it” when it comes to making Linux dirt simple to use like Apple). They have had 15 years to do it and it still hasn’t happened. And larger servers using disk as tape (memory will always be way more expensive than disk and disk way more than tape and data continues to grow exponentially).
Further, I would add that Solaris will be gone in ten years. I love Sun, but they took too long to jump on the open source bandwagon with their OS much like Apollo took too long to open their network technology (and Sun’s NFS, opensource, took the market).
However, I would say it is fun to make predictions, so thanks for making some!
[...] I’ll add three to the ones that Stewart just posted: [...]
Wayland is an interesting new X server building on all the stuff that’s been pushed from Xorg into the kernel.
No Dtrace prediction?
I wonder if someone will make a hard disk library like a tape library – lots of disks stored powered off, with an elevator that grabs them and plugs them in when required. Powered by SAM-QFS perhaps?
I -hope- there is a good ZFS alternative (BTRFS looks promising) that is open for all to use, and with the hardware compatibilities that Linux has. Using OpenSolaris right now has been a pain – from my ignorance on Solaris administration, outdated documentation, hardware compatibility questions, an incorrect/partial HCL, and a bug system that is too hard to use and not capable of updates.
mike: Outdated documentation? that’s a new one on me. Would be good to know your issues here, along with the HCL. Are you sure you’ve been using the correct bug system for the OpenSolaris 2008.05 release – defect.opensolaris.org, a bugzilla instance. Not all projects have migrated there yet, but many are looking at it now.
Stewart: you should check Monday’s announcement for how important a decent file system like ZFS is for SSD – but you may have been following Adam Leventhal’s blogs already…
Most of the 2 year predictions are safe predictions (which is good), although with the advances in Fedora 10 I doubt the X one will become true.
I also doubt all of the 5 year predictions. Mobiles will still suck and people will still be too suckered in to Microsoft.
Linux is not going to surpass Solaris in filesystem capability any time soon. Certainly not within 2 years! Solaris has a comfortable lead and is likely to maintain that lead, given the profile of its customers and the calibre of its engineering. Furthermore, there is considerable reluctance outside the Solaris community – and even among kernel developers – to acknowledge ZFS as something truly revolutionary. Apple is the oustanding exception – as he has so often done, Jobs was smart enough to recognise and integrate ZFS as a best of breed technology.
I REALLY need an alternative to ZFS…. btrfs would be easily welcomed!
So in mobile phones you don’t list Nokia even as “(small)”. That’s pretty hard – or just an oversight… Are you assuming that the company that ships 40% of the mobile phones today will go bankrupt before 5 years?
Here’s another thought: In 5 years I predict a majority of mobile phones sold in the world will still *not* be smart phones. (I’m taking a chance here, I’m sure it will be close to 50/50, but I still don’t expect China, Africa and LatAm suddenly becoming rich in 5 years.) So you are predicting that Apple will be in the business of selling cheap, simple, black-and-white-screen phones? Microsoft and RIM certainly won’t.
Funny that you should mention Microsoft and Drizzle…
> There will be somebody developing a a MySQL compatible release based off Drizzle
Care to elaborate? If you take all the MySQL stuff that’s not in Drizzle and add into Drizzle, you get MySQL + Drizzle’s extra features. Why not just port Drizzle features to MySQL then?
Henrik: r.e. Nokia: i see them eventually switching platforms. I have almost no doubt that Maemo will eventually be a phone OS as well.
r.e. MySQL and Drizzle. Drizzle has so much cleanup and modularity improvements over MySQL (and soon metadata) that it woudl be a lot more sensible to start with a Drizzle base than a MySQL base.
[...] Smith has issued his technology predictions, which, like the Oscar nominations, we have all been waiting on. This is somewhat off-topic, but [...]