Growth?

IT in 2008 is set for pretty good growth allaround. There are signs that the Corporate worldis once more buying computers and infrastructure,and that improvements in the infrastructure, suchas faster internet, and faster intranet speedswill finally start to make inroads through morebusinesses. On the consumer side of things, asmorgasbord of options awaits us in 2008, from agrowing array of electronic toys, to ever greaterreliance on computers at home.

Business

Apart from the fact that most businesses nowattach to the internet with DSL (say 512Kb/s) orbetter (multiple T1's & 10Mb/s+) speed, I seethe growth of upgrades to existing systems rollingforward. Higher speed services will be required bysome businesses to do more work, and for others itwill just be to catch up with the demand theyalready place on their connections. This will leadto new network infrastructure - the old routerswill throttle any new bandwidth unless replaced -which will lead to companies looking at theirinternal speeds too. Servers can now be cheaplyadded to gigabit backbones. All the networkingtechnology is rapidly becoming commodityequipment, with the commensurate drop in price.

Vista will still lurk out there like somebloated shark, but while companies may not go forit as an upgrade, they have seen the writing onthe wall, and may be moving to ever more capablemachines, more RAM, more disk space, bettergraphics cards, just incase they do need to updateto a new OS. In the meantime Windows XP users willget quite a kick in performance from these newsystems!

Domestic

It seems the home owner has made a largeassault on PC vendors at the year end, I suspectthat Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo also saw some ofthe same pop in sales of their game consoles. Thisnew generation ofhardware is much more capable than previous years,but whether there is anything additional to makeuse of it I don't know.

One area that has seen power, and use, is thatof cell phones. These devices have made a bigsplash in connectivity over the last few years,and with the iPhone giving some impetus in the USmarket to more capable devices, I think we willsee the phone companies forced into providing someof the features and cost structures that otherparts of the world enjoy.

Recently I noticed that some companies are nowselling RAID disk devices directly to the homeuser. This is a huge step forward in the directionof amalgamating users data, and backing it up, orat least keeping it safe. These devices mount on ahome network. With homes gaining a mix of wirelessand wired devices, including digital cameras,cellphone features, laptops and even desktops, andeven HD Tivos, there is a growing need forreliable large disk capacity. All those mp3's,downloaded videos, cell phone recorded videos, andelectronic personal documents need a good, securehome.

The fringes

Out there, on the far side, is a new technologythat could offer many interesting opportunities :Quantum Computing. The development of new devicesto do Quantum computing is in it's infancy (thinkwhat Microprocessors were like in 1976.)

The first multi-qubit processors were announcedlate this year. These will afford people theopportunity to look at the technology and start toget the ball rolling. We have traditional views ofhow to program these things as of yet, but whenthe hit the mainstream, which may occur for somehigh end universities this year, I believe we haveto start rethinking what computer programming isgoing to be about.