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Clear-Cutting the Future: We’ll Hear More About This in 2005
12/29/2004
- The battle between PeopleSoft (Who?) and Oracle is over now, but we will all be watching carefully in 2005 to see how Oracle treats current PeopleSoft users. Will Oracle's bean counters insist on maximizing the dollars it can get by force-weaning users away through lack of support and new developments? Probably, but maybe not. One certain 2005 news story is about the (mostly) PeopleSoft staff gets decimated by layoffs as the companies consolidate.
- Oh, and there will be lots of other stories about consolidation in the information technology world.
- Offshore outsourcing will be a continuing story in the general news media and there will be more stories about it happening in higher education, too. The first of those appeared at the end of 2005 from places like the University of Michigan Hospital (Hmm, another U-M Hospital connection.) outsourcing most of its medical transcription. More recently we are learning about the life-saving benefits of offshore outsourcing the initial readings of MRI scans. It may well be that cheaper, quicker reading of scans by experienced people on other continents saves money and this can allow more scans to occur. But what happens to the "lives" of the locally-based medical technicians and medical transcription service providers? I guess they can always retrain.
- The P2P battle will get larger as more bandwidth and higher speed brings the movie industry into the fight alongside the RIAA.
- Cool gadgets will get smaller and more powerful and this could well be the year when Bluetooth and related technologies hit the consciousness of the wider consumer public.
- Google and Mozilla will continue to bring us innovative new things. As I write this, Google has recently entered the digital property fray in a way that will bring it directly up against Bill Gates, with its agreements to digitize millions of books from university libraries over the next six years. And, Mozilla is about to release Mozilla Calendar, its calendaring program which, when linked to Mozilla Thunderbird (e-mail), is a direct attack on Microsoft Outlook.
- Oh, yes, and we will-all year long-hear over and over more stories about Longhorn, the new Microsoft operating system which just might be available in 2006.
But I think that what will interest me the most in 2005 will be the ongoing efforts by older industries and bigger companies to slow down the advance of innovation using digital technologies. We've already seen some of the negative effects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, during the passage of which Congress seemed to have forgotten the existence of such things as "fair use." Big industry is big industry, whether it's farming or entertainment. Big farming prefers monoculture over biodiversity; and big IT prefers controlled access to proprietary functionality rather than . . . what can we call it? . . . techdiversity?
At times it seems as though it's a black and white battle between economies of scale on one side versus systems thinking and diversity on the other. (And, yes, Acacia Industries fits right into the middle of all this.)
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