Situation normal, just outsourced

With the smell of last years heady failure at prognostication still fresh in my nostrils I will set out and polish the looking glass again with more fervour!

Business Boom

The US economy, after several years of blood bath will spring back into action. Fueled by still low, but probably rising, interest rates the business cycle will leap into action. Corporations have a lot of equipment that has to be replaced, and while some of it was updated in 2003, as they bring on more employees, corporations will need to bring in entirely new equipment, not just replacement parts. They will also start the process of building the long delayed new programs and systems, driven by the needs of the sales departments to extract ever more market share. With new product lines everywhere, and impressive productivity gains, corporations have everything to gain and little to loose as they jump on 2004.

IT Employment & Outsourcing

The same rosy picture will not rise for the IT industry. Outsourcing is draining jobs out of the US at a rate approaching 5000 jobs a month. While this is not a killer rate, it is enough to staunch any big employment come back. This rate will persist through much of 2004, but before the end of the year there will possibly be a pull back, not so much because there are no more jobs left to outsource but because the employee pools in countries like India, Ireland and Russia may be used up. We have to remember that the US economy is huge, and the European economy is none too shabby either, when both go after a relatively limited pool of skills in odd corners of the world there will be a point at which there are no more bodies to find. In India this will take the form of a collapse of product quality, in other countries rising rates will limit contracts.

With three years of dead job prospects behind us, the number of people coming into the industry will reach a 10 or maybe 20 year low. Corporations will have to start working hard to rebuild faith in the whole concept of IT employment being a career in the US job market.

In addition to the reduction in numbers of IT people over the last few years, we will also begin to find out what the drawdown has done to the headhunting community. I noticed this year that many headhunters are no more, and others have transitioned into headhunting in other disciplines. This will cut more IT people from potential jobs and cut companies from potential recruits. It will slow up the entire re-employment process.

Linux, SCO, Patents and Legal issues

The SCO attack on Linux will likely fizzle out, there are too many unknowns for the legal community to have the warm and fuzzes about SCO's attacks. The intellectual property issues SCO raises will be of import, but in SCO's case it will be hard to tell who stole what from whom. SCO may be gone before year end. Linux will take over from most Unix implementations, with the possible exception of Sun's Solaris. Do we find Sun following SCO down the Linux litigious path?

Patent Law is a mess. The US Patent Office is in dire straights. The courts are having problems dealing with the issues of poor USPO work. We might see the first efforts to remove the Patent office, either through in-competency rulings or by legal moves from Congress. These moves will be opposed by the largest software makers who have the most to lose, but smaller companies seeking protection from the insanity of meaningless patents will start to call for change.

Small Computing

Computing is coming in ever smaller doses. MP3 players are now smaller than a cell phone. Cell phones have computer keyboards on them, and keyboards have computers built into them. We are not at pervasive computing, but we will see a broader range of applications turn up in unlikely places. Palm computers will see major inroads to corporate acceptance as legitimate means of doing business. Corporations will start to move critical systems to a level that allows Palm applications to integrate with them.

Java and .NET

Java and .NET will have a little skirmish in the corporation, but .NET will take back the Microsoft server. If Mono is allowed to flourish, then even Linux and Solaris could become viable .NET platforms. Will there be a .NET battle with either the CLR or C# like Microsoft had with Sun? Doubtful. Microsoft threw much of this new technology at various standards committees, making sure that they were not seen as the sole owners. Sun still has issues with getting changes that the programming public wants into Java, Sun has too much vested in it to let go enough. We could see Java head down the road to marginalization. The fact that Java has been around for about 7 or 8 years means it has had a reasonable life, it may just be time another technology takes it's place.

Alternative computing

In the dark corners of Universities and in the most secret spaces in a few hardware vendors, great amounts of research are going into Light based computing, quantum computing and bio-computing. In 2004 we will probably see the first small steps to getting a quantum computing transistor on some form of chip.

The work into these new forms of hardware will also spawn a growing interest in the first fundamental rebuild of how we write programs since Fortran first ran. This will take the form of new languages, methodologies and techniques to make use of the massively parallel, multi-stage (multi-phase?) computing this new hardware will allow. We will begin to get a sense as to what we will have to learn in order to make use of these new technologies.

We have seen massively parallel computing take shape over the last few years, mostly in the form of screen savers that do anything from SETI analysis to finding compounds to combat cancer, to protein folding, to hunting for prime numbers. Will we see the first efforts to break encryption in a similar manner, with tens of thousands of public computers quietly put to work in breaking say Drug cartels encrypted message traffic?

Summary

2004 has the potential to be a quiet year on the personnel side of things, but I believe that the technology side will see the first signs of an up tick in activity in nearly 3 years.