I keep going back and forth on whether I should make predictions or not. Mostly it is because I hate being wrong. This year I decided to rank my predictions along a scale of how confident I am so I won’t feel so bad when some things just don’t happen.

Safe Predictions
1. The economy is going to get worse before it gets better. The upshot of it all will be that IT budgets and salaries will be impacted and those people/programs/applications who can show value will be rewarded while those who can’t will go away. I think the most visible part of this will be the consolidation of several IT companies.
2. Web 2.0 will be the “only” web we talk about. I am not saying that everything site will become a social network or be AJAX enabled but that people will get tired of the 2.0 moniker and just call it the Web again.
3. The browser wars will become relevant again. With the expected release of IE8 and updates to Firefox and Chrome there will once again be great interest in standards and features of browsers.

Moderately Risky Predictions
4. Online advertising will be hit especially hard by the economic downturn. I have watched Google vs. Microsoft for many years and almost everything boils down to the advertising and the revenue it produces. I believe that as companies get conservative with their advertising budget they will pull back from online advertising more than TV or print. I think this would be a good choice since the click through rate is so low that it would be easy to justify cutting back. This will make the whole Microsoft Yahoo! non deal seem irrelevant.
5. Windows 7 will be released in time for the Christmas buying season and will be on new machines but will not see a lot of upgrade licenses. I hear a few people who have decided not to upgrade to Vista say they are waiting for the next version. By the time Windows 7 gets here their machines will be a year older and the prices of new machines will have dropped more making less sense for them to upgrade their machines. If you are already on Vista you might upgrade to Windows 7 but again the same economics of more memory and cores on machines make replacing machines an attractive option. I am hoping that at some time Microsoft will begin to treat the OS as something that people will mostly replace and make design decisions based on it.

Wild Guesses
6. Business intelligence will become more important. I have been reading experts that say that they feel that BI will be less important as companies scale back on their budgets. I feel the opposite should happen. The amount of data being collected is not going down so companies should be investing in BI and data mining to make the data into an actionable asset.
7. Cloud computing will not be widely adopted. This may seem like a safe guess but I am conflicted about whether companies will perceive an economic benefit to cloud computing that outweighs the cost of retooling and retraining. Again some of the other experts I have been following say they feel the cloud will be an area of excitement and a lot of investment. I am guessing that the vast majority of companies and developers will be more inclined to go with safe bets when spending their budgets rather than betting on a new platform.

On this last day of 2008 I am keenly aware of the clock and the influence it has in our lives. Especially today there are 2 issues of clock and computers that have to be fixed.

Zune No More
According to this article at cruchgear Zune 30 GB all over the world are refusing to boot all the way. Mine is one of them. I guess all I can do is be patient until a fix or workaround comes out.

PDC CSD VPC
I meant to blog this last week but I didn’t. The VPC image from PDC with Oslo and the other CSD products has an issue where Visual Studio will/has expire on January 1 (It is already 01 Jan 2009 in some parts of the world). I don’t know if you can get it back after the expiration but if you haven’t run into the problem yet you need to disable time synchronization between the VPC and the host OS so you can set the time independently. If you have joined the VPC to a domain this will not work and you will have to wait for the CTP. You still only get 2 months of run time with the VPC so I wouldn’t leave it running 24x7 but this should extend your life for a little while.

Jeff Beehler’s blog post gives instructions on how to disable the time synchronization.
If you converted your VPC image to Hyper-V then this post will help you disable the time synchronization.

Last night Microsoft Update prompted me to install an update. I thought it was the updated definition files for Windows Defender and told it to go ahead. A little while later I was being prompted to restart my machine. I thought “What in the world? I haven’t ever had to reboot after a Defender definition update.” After the reboot I looked and saw that it was a patch to IE. I realized it was out of band and therefore probably very important. Today I have had several e-mails that look like the one below. Microsoft seems to want us to patch our machines.

Download urgent security update for Internet Explorer

Today Microsoft released an urgent security update for Windows Internet Explorer. Because the flaw may expose computers to remote code execution, the severity rating for this security update is critical.
From the moment we learned of the issue, Microsoft has been working around the clock to respond to this situation and provide a security update that helps protect our customers.
If you have turned on Automatic Updates, your computer will install the security update automatically. If you don't use Automatic Updates, go to http://update.microsoft.com. This update might cause your computer to restart.
For more information on this update, see the bulletin summary. For more information on how to protect your PC, visit the Microsoft Security At Home site.

Today’s e-mail had some different news about conferences. There was an announcement that Apple will not be giving the keynote or exhibit at Macworld.
I also had a call for speakers for MIX (actually it came yesterday but I was behind in e-mail).
I had another message asking if I want to present in a virtual conference.

I can somewhat see Apple’s point that they are reaching consumers in their stores and on the web. I also suspect that with the economy, availability of high quality training on the web, and slow maturing of the industry they may see the need to be at conferences as somehow diminished. I would tend to disagree. Although the number of people attending in-person events might be shrinking they tend to be the people who have a passion and can really help to drive your solutions forward.

I like the idea of virtual conferences because it allows me to present topics that are important and that I am passionate about and gives people the time to attend at times convenient to them. It reduces the interruption in their day-to-day duties and doesn’t incur the costs for travel.

The biggest reason I like live conferences is the ability to talk to the other people there. I may be different but I like to ask people at lunch what they learned and what they think. Getting a totally different perspective and having the ability to respectfully exchange views is something that I don’t usually find in the on-line learning venues.

It will be interesting to see how many people agree with me that there is a great value in being at the conference in person and will continue to support conferences or if they will go the way of the punch card.

According to the article Microsoft Releases Open-source Content Management App from PC World Microsoft has released a new open source content management tool called Oxite. It is designed to show how to use ASP.NET MVC and is for developers but I found it interesting that they are "dogfooding"it on the MIX site. I know MIX is supposed to be about the latest and greatest in Web technologies but it seems very bold to go with something built on an alpha release of the code for such a public site. I guess that means that Microsoft is confident in their technologies.

I hope to be able to go to MIX this year to learn more about the web technologies that are coming out. I think the most important thing I get from conferences is the ability to talk to the speakers and other attendees to find out what their perspectives are. I tend to hang out and interact with people who have a similar view as I do so it is always refreshing to hear from someone else who has a totally different opinion on things and to try to find out why. I have learned a lot of new things this way.

I was looking at http://www.msteched.com/teched/default.aspx and noticed that registration for TechEd has opened already. It will be May 11-15 in Los Angeles. You can save $300 by registering by December 31. This might be a good time to ask your boss for a Christmas present or year end bonus and get registered for the conference.

It hasn't really been a secret that Microsoft was going to change http://home.live.com to be more of a social network. There were more than just the two articles I reference below 

Sweeping Changes At Live.com: It’s A Social Network!

 http://windowslive.com/ComingSoon?ocid=EML_PROED_HM_Acq_WL_getbetter_112008

Now that I have had a chance to see it for myself and to be invited to some of my friend's networks I am not really sure how I feel about it. I like the look and feel but when I started digging into the settings for my profile I saw that the default was that everyone could see my network. I understand that social networks are built on sharing and for that reason I don't know that I have a problem with the default but it would have been nice to have been told that.

Another issue is that a lot of the invitations to join a network are coming with just the first name of the person. I understand this is also a setting in the profile but it is a little annoying to have to go and look to see which John or Andrew is inviting me to their network. I did find that if I go into my profile I can see the invitations and there it had the full name of the people who had invited me.

I already maintain contacts on Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Facebook besides my e-mail contacts so I am not sure how many other web sites I want to use for social networking but I will give live.com a try if for no other reason than I am always checking my hotmail accounts and it isn't that much more work to add in people to my network.

I got back from a very relaxing Thanksgiving yesterday and I tried to catch up on e-mail. While responding to a message in my primary Hotmail account I got the message "This account is currently blocked from sending messages. If you don't think you've violated the Windows Live Terms of Use, please contact customer support". There were links to the terms of use and to customer support. I reviewed the terms of use and since I hadn't been on Hotmail for 3 or 4 days I was pretty sure that I didn't do anything. The only thing I thought might have remotely happened was that somehow a lot of spam was spent using my address as the from address and going through the Hotmail systems. Since I wasn't getting a lot of e-mail telling me that my message could not be delivered I figured that wasn't it.

I filled out the form on the customer support link. Today I got back a message with a Microsoft case number, and a message that "I have determined that we need to engage additional resources to address your issue.  I will take the responsibility in making sure that your concern will be given priority.".

Wow, I hope I didn't break anything major while I wasn't using the service. I am still receiving messages and can send and receive from my other Hotmail accounts so I don't think it has anything to do with me personally (or they haven't connected all my accounts). If you are trying to send me something realize that I am getting it but having problems sending replies. If I ever find out what went wrong I will post here so everyone will know what not to do.

I know many of us are visiting friends and relatives for the Thanksgiving holiday and many more will be doing the same for Christmas. As the unofficial IT support person for my family there are several things that I try to do when I am with my family to make sure that they are protected.

1. Remove the useless programs on the computer. I spent some time yesterday removing all the trial and crippled versions of software from my parent's machine that they do not use. Some of the programs they didn't like, others they didn't understand, and some were installed by my nieces and nephews and they didn't want them any more. After freeing up some disk space I always defragment the hard drive.
2. Update the firewall and virus protection. I make sure the firewall is turned on and that they have good virus protection. On my parent's machine the free trial of the anti-virus software had expired so I removed it and installed AVG free from http://free.avg.com.
3. Run Microsoft Update. My parents rarely leave their computer on all night so the default time of 2 A.M. to install Windows Updates means that they don't all get installed in a timely manner. I make sure that I run through the update until there are no more high priority updates to any of their software.
4. Update other software. If Acrobat, Java, or other programs are reporting an update I will update them as well.
5. Prepare old machines for a better life. Well, I don't know that recycling is a better life but occasionally someone will have an old computer that they want to donate to charity or recycle. With the data on the hard drive being worth more than the machine itself I make sure that I clean off the hard drive. The tool I use for that is Darik's Boot and Nuke available at http://www.dban.org. It will erase the disk so bank accounts, tax returns, and other data that shouldn't be read by others is gone.

I am sure you have other tasks that you perform regularly. If you think I have missed something leave me a comment to let me know. I might just add it to my list of things to do next time I am visiting relatives.