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Comdex: Panel Predicts Death of Sun, Apple, Novell
Monday, 2003 October 27 - 2:02 am
You've got to love those industry "experts" who try to predict the future of technology of computing. How do we know if their predictions will come true? Maybe we can look at their track records.

A recent article by Rob Enderle highlighted a panel discussion with Ted Farrel (from Oracle), Greg Stein (from Apache), John Montgomery (from Microsoft), and Laura DiDio (from the Yankee Group). They unanimously predicted that Apple, Sun, and Novell would be dead in the "future" (timeline unspecified), mainly because those companies did not follow the Microsoft-X86 "standard".

Upon reading this, I wondered how many of these people predicted the rise of the graphical user interface, the birth of the Internet, the rise of Linux, digital cameras, peer-to-peer networking, the iPod... Every couple of years, a major discontinuity comes along that shakes up the computing and technology industry. It's laughable to imagine that we will creep along incrementally for the next ten years, watching Sun, Apple, and Novell slowly fade away into the night (presumably sighing and resigning themselves to their fate the whole way). Is it inconceivable to these folks that Sun will be able to leverage Java (one of the most important cross-platform standards in the last couple of decades) into an Internet services architecture? Is it inconceivable that Apple will find yet another killer consumer product that will launch a totally new industry segment (as the iPod did)? Is it inconceivable that Novell will merge its networking experience with its newly acquired Suse Linux segment, to become a powerhouse in Linux networking and back-end applications?

In this industry, the only companies that fade away are those that stodgily cling to a single technology. IBM (one of the companies predicted to survive by this forum) narrowly avoided this fate; it jumped off the mainframe and typewriter bandwagon just in time. So any prediction of success that requires using the X86 architecture for the next decade is simply ridiculous.

You want my predictions for the next ten years? How about these:

- Grid computing and distributed application servers will become more prominent.
- Smaller embedded devices, all communicating with each other, will replace monolithic PCs.
- Something will come along that combines the best attributes of e-mail, voice mail, video chat, and instant messaging, and it will spawn a new breed of devices to take care of it.

Now, if you can't see a place for Sun, Apple, and Novell here, you're just not thinking ahead. Rob Enderle, I scoff at you and your panel.
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Posted by Ken in: techwatch

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