As is traditional, I now present my predictions for 2010.
- Apple Lala acquisition having telegraphed Apple’s intentions, 2010 becomes the year of the media cloud. Further consolidation in the space precipitated as the big players further consolidate the space, needing to acquire rather than build from scratch. Google, Nokia, and Amazon, and RIM all make acquisitions in this space.
- 2010 won’t yet be the year of the smartbook, but the market is starting to get serious about them. What makes this a cloud prediction? Smart books will be cloud-powered, not just always-connected netbooks not running Windows. Cloud power is a necessary component to enable the smartbook experience, especially with media, which is so consumptive of storage.
- Amazon announced spot pricing for EC2 instances. This isn’t really the open market for cloud computing cycles, as Amazon sets the bottom price. Amazon (the leader in this kind of thinking, clearly) takes the final step during 2010 and lets the market determine the pricing.
- Database vendors – especially Oracle – introduce their own cloud-based database services to compete more directly with Amazon’s RDS.
- Microsoft should marry Azure + Zune for their own media cloud solution, but won’t get it done. Microsoft ends up making an acquisition in cloud-based media as well.
- Several companies (startups most likely) – take commodity computing back to something that has been tried before but not yet been a huge commercial success: Cycle stealing/renting from consumer PCs and paying the owners. This time around, the platforms are getting more standarized, as is the pricing. If your applications are architected to take advantage of a service like Amazon Spot pricing, chances are you could use a consumer-hardware-based service.
- Contrary to common expectation, Google does not introduce a general purpose compute or storage platform, but keeps their play in the market to cloud-based applications.
Happy New Year!
-bw