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.