I am going to assume here that we make it to the end of the year and that the Mayan calendar end of the world scenario is not going to occur. I am also going to include a couple of non-IT predictions, one at the start and one at the end. I need one of them for the basis of my predictions.
My first prediction is an economic crash before the middle of the year. This will affect Europe, the US, China and the rest of the world in varying degrees. It will be worse that the last one and possibly worse than the big one last century. When it occurs it will have a big impact on IT growth.
So with that in mind I predict some growth for the first part of the year then (and I love this term) negative growth for some time afterwards. Even without a crash the world markets will remain depressed so the usual doubling in speed and halving of prices normally associated with the IT world will not happen this year. Changes will be incremental.
The hard drive market will have recovered by the end of the first quarter and we will be able to get nicely prices units once again. I don't expect sizes to grow that much this year but 2 TB drives will enter the sweet spot for purchase. A number of current hard drive plug in options are maxed out at 2 TB so be careful when you upgrade your drives.
Motherboard memory will stay around the 8-16GB mark this year and in reality most applications will never need much more than that this year anyway. Graphics cards with 1Gb of RAM will be at the low end with 1.5 and 2Gb becoming more common. 2TB will be the most common HDD purchase this year, once they drop below $100 again that is.
Monitors have reached a kind of maximum size on a desk these days and while 30 inch units are available I still see the 24-25 inch models being the most common but with the 27 inch versions becoming even less expensive. No real movement on printers and scanner again this year. The base unit will become a little less expensive and wireless connectivity will become standard but the cost will remain in the consumables. I expect more combined units will a few more features but until ink prices drop I don't see any movement in this area. One exception will be more support for plug in camera cards and direct printing and even manipulation of the image from the printer. How far this goes will depend on the marketplace.
Digital camera will continue to improve with even better CCDs, higher ISO ratings, better low end light handling and slightly higher CCD resolution. The main improvements will be in the lens area as better lenses are put on compact cameras. Video support will continue to be improved as well with 720p being left behind for 1080p.
I'm not sure but we may even see an increase from the 1080p standard this year to a higher rating. This may even double. Blu-ray will continue to languish and will finally come down to regular DVD prices this year. The audio providers will still not get digital online music sales working properly and iTunes will start to lose sales to other more sensible providers. The Apple worshippers will continue to use and support the service of course.
Expect another service pack for Windows 7 and my WAG for Windows 8 delivery is November this year.
I expect to see more countries restricting access to the Internet this year. Pay particular attention to the Islamic nations, parts of Eastern Europe and former Russian states. There will be no lack of malware this year with worms still the most common and groups like Anonymous continuing to break into 'secure' data stores. Governments are lazy and inefficient, as are large organisations. Since they cannot keep up with the latest techniques they remain vulnerable.
Based on what I saw at the end of 2011 games will continue to get more lifelike placing more pressure on better graphics card upgrades for players. I'm still making my way through Skyrim Elder Scrolls and every time I think I am getting to the end a whole new set of quests opens up. I will definitely be getting the sequel to this one, and playing it in the Christmas break. As games get more and more realistic the do-gooder movements will become more active and try to get stuff banned. I am not an advocate of this and the psychological papers I have read are divided on the issue but tend towards the opposite of what the special interest groups are saying. That being said even if banned any game is easy to download from the Internet either as a legal or pirated version.
USB 3.0 devices will continue to get better and hopefully the device drivers will keep up. I have never been happy with Microsoft's implementation and support for USB since 1.0 and hopefully Windows 8 will address the inadequacies here. I doubt this will happen and millions of users will continue to suffer from USB bugs. Apart from this there will be no real movement in device connectivity speed this year, at the peripheral level at least.
I'm not sure where motherboards and CPUs are going to go this year. More SATA ports would be nice, better front panel socket connectivity would be good. Some incremental pipeline improvements but I don't expect this year to be a big mover as far as CPUs are concerned. 6-8 CPU cores will still be the common maximum and MHz speeds per core will not move upwards much either with the 3-4MHz range still the most common.
Battery technology will incrementally improve but nothing major. Carbon tube technologies are still a few years away in any commercial sense and there are no other new options ready for common usage either. Broadband technology will improve a little but the biggest mover will be wireless. More and more people will adopt wireless connectivity and already obsolete projects like the Australian NBN will quietly fade away. The youth use mobile technologies, some don't even buy a fixed phone line anymore.
As I mentioned earlier a fairly slow year for IT improvement with no real leaps forward.
My second no IT prediction is that the world will continue to get colder. A paper being published in Feb from the Arctic Circle research centre is predicting a 6.5 degree drop in temperature over 10 years. This translates to about 3 or so near the equator. The paper has been assessed with a 95% confidence interval in correctness which is unusual. If correct we should start to even notice the effects as soon as this year. It will also mean the end to the ridiculous global warming movement (and religion). The Chinese have produced a paper looking at 2000 years of data and predict a cooling trend until 2060 as have three other scientific papers published in the last few months. Put a fork in it, it's done.
No matter what happens have a great, successful and Happy New Year.
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