Today I’m joining the time honored tradition of making predictions for the new year. Translation: wild guesses and obvious statements.
1. Apple Makes A Move To Improve Internet Services
Perhaps Apple’s single biggest weak spot has been online services. It is clear they know how to do a good job making hardware, all the way down to the chip level in some cases, and software to run on that hardware. Execution of large scale Internet services hasn’t gone as smoothly.
In the past people have suggested that Apple might buy an existing company to help bring in large scale web DNA. I think what is more likely is that Apple makes a few key high level hires that build out new teams.
This won’t be an easy thing for Apple. When I look around at more recent successful web startups I see lots of sharing. That will be a significant change of pace for a company that invests heavily in secrecy.
I consider Swift going open source a positive sign.
2. Lua Gets More Attention
Cloudflare has been pushing the Nginx + Lua combination for years now. I consider that particular combination one of the most under rated technology stacks around.
If you were heavy into all the microservices talk during 2015 then Lua+Nginx is an exciting combination. I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS launches a new service around Lua.
I recommend OpenResty ( a build of Nginx with Lua ) and lua.space ( community news ).
3. Flash First Video Becomes Shameful
We have pretty good support for the video element, it is time to move Flash for video to a fallback position. You are probably already doing that for mobile devices, time to go all in.
4. More Open Source From Microsoft
Microsoft has started to gain back some geek cred with their push into making more of their code open source ( check out https://github.com/Microsoft ). My prediction is they go even further, announcing one of their larger key products will go open source. The big bets would be Exchange or SQL Server. The other big candidate would a component of Office.
5. Strange U.S. Presidential Politics
If you’d asked about this a year ago, I would have focused on how much I’m not keen on family dynasties for President. At the time Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton were safe bets on being the candidates from their respective parties. One had a brother and father who were President, the other a husband. Since then there have been dramatic changes on the Republican side, and very little change on the Democratic side.
My prediction: things get even stranger before the general election. This might be the year for a contested convention.