2016 - A year of Technology Cloud Bursts, El Nino-Like Changes posted: 27/12/2015
by Andy Marken
Better View - Sometimes you have to step back a little way from the noise, excitement and hype around all of the new technology coming at you and take a cold, hard look at what is really going to impact the billions of consumers on the planet.
It may not be a profound observation; but every day we get up, the damn world has changed. No wonder 2015 passed so quickly; and we're staring at a totally new world of uncertainty!
We're entering a period of a crapload of new things, new content; and it's all going to center on the cloud - like it or not!
2016 will see the cloud provider leaders play an increasing role in the business of business and the business of consumers. Not because it's a good thing, but because we'll relax a lot of our requirements (privacy, security).
The big four in the U.S. (with sites around the globe) - IBM, Amazon, Google, MS - will be joined by Facebook and smaller players as well as three majors from China - Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei.
Oracle talks a good cloud trick, Salesforce delivers. Adobe has shown the cloud is the path to profits and Autodesk has made a solid move to the cloud. A few folks will pretend to be big players and buy a lot of storage but the majority of firms in 2016 will use existing clouds as the resting place for a gazillion tons of data from all of the connected devices that they don't have a clue what to do with.
There will be a mad rush in the year ahead with wearables, smart cars, smart homes, robots, drones and content production/distribution all relying on the cloud. Not because it's cheaper but because organizations will realize that the cost (and futility) of privacy and security is best left to people who have the few experts who do this stuff fulltime live in the cloud firms.
The biggest challenge in 2016 is that the cloud and the Internet will become very political as governments around the globe attempt the impossible - control the data at least in their country. To avoid the issue, encryption will become standard despite the tantrums of military forces and governmental agencies.
Who cares 99.99 percent of the content sent across the iNet and stored in the cloud is boring, idle white noise.
The problem is all of that data is critical to the operation of governments and business, enticing to governmental agencies and irresistible to hackers and neer-do-wells. Governments may move to agree to rules of war in cyberspace as China and the U.S. have tentatively done to use common sense in not crippling individual country's vital infrastructure; but the rules of combat won't affect casual or plain evil hackers.
In cyberspace, it is very difficult to determine who shot the first shot (assuming a government entity does) and virtually impossible for countries to control the actions of their citizen groups such as Anonymous, the mob (really bad folks) or folks who mischievously or unwittingly release bad stuff.
Cybersecurity will become one of the biggest concerns and obstacles for the industry this year. Forget privacy because at the end of the day:
- Folks don't give a damn as long as they get something for themselves so they'll freely deliver up everything they know!
- You can't go in the back room and pull the Internet plug to keep people out of your cloud, your device, your information
Cybersecurity will become critical to every aspect of business and personal activity in the year ahead.
VR - Highs, Lows
Alone Time - VR/AR can provide the benefits of a lot more than alone time or being somewhere else while you're still here. There is a lot of important potential for the technology; but it's still a work in progress.
While it may have been around for more than a decade, VR (virtual reality)/AR (augmented reality) is coming on like gangbusters toward the end of 2015 and will continue to be hot, exciting for at least the first half of the year.
While a lot of noise surrounds game play and new entertainment, the valuable applications of VR will be in vertical areas like education/training, healthcare, industrial production/maintenance, an in-depth look at your next trip/vacation and dreary work/professional applications that don't get kids - or security analysts - overly excited.
VR won't fade into oblivion in 2016 but it will join other insanely great technology in Gartner's Trough of Discontentment as the innovators and first adopters realize all of the content is yet to be built and watching the same skydive or playing the same game again and again is dumb!
Game makers are already working on a two-pronged approach - lipstick on the hog of existing titles to make them VR ready and new developments. One is quick/dirty, the other takes time.
With VR and 360 degree cameras already introduced, content producers are already pumping out (refiguring) content and rushing through quasi-VR production to meet the apparent demand. Like 3D, we'll see a lot of bad stuff over the next year or two that will disappoint a lot of folks until the craft is mastered.
2016 and 2017 will be a period of mass experimentation to see what works - hardware and software/content - but as AMD's Layla Mah, lead architect for VR and advanced rendering, said at SMPTE's conference, engineers and designers can count on steady work for the next 10-15 years!
Buzzing Us
Look Up - While there are a growing number of important applications for drones, the tens of thousands that people buy for recreational use could slow the industry or cripple it as governmental agencies and privacy organizations strike back.
With an estimated 700,000 drones sold this Christmas, it's fun to be in the flying robot business.
There are a ton of excelle
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2016 - A year of Technology Cloud Bursts, El Nino-Like Changes posted: 27/12/2015 
