Growth?

IT in 2008 is set for pretty good growth all around. There are signs that the Corporate world is once more buying computers and infrastructure, and that improvements in the infrastructure, such as faster internet, and faster intranet speeds will finally start to make inroads through more businesses. On the consumer side of things, a smorgasbord of options awaits us in 2008, from a growing array of electronic toys, to ever greater reliance on computers at home.

Business

Apart from the fact that most businesses now attach to the internet with DSL (say 512Kb/s) or better (multiple T1's & 10Mb/s+) speed, I see the growth of upgrades to existing systems rolling forward. Higher speed services will be required by some businesses to do more work, and for others it will just be to catch up with the demand they already place on their connections. This will lead to new network infrastructure - the old routers will throttle any new bandwidth unless replaced - which will lead to companies looking at their internal speeds too. Servers can now be cheaply added to gigabit backbones. All the networking technology is rapidly becoming commodity equipment, with the commensurate drop in price.

Vista will still lurk out there like some bloated shark, but while companies may not go for it as an upgrade, they have seen the writing on the wall, and may be moving to ever more capable machines, more RAM, more disk space, better graphics cards, just incase they do need to update to a new OS. In the meantime Windows XP users will get quite a kick in performance from these new systems!

Domestic

It seems the home owner has made a large assault on PC vendors at the year end, I suspect that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo also saw some of the same pop in sales of their game consoles. This new generation of hardware is much more capable than previous years, but whether there is anything additional to make use of it I don't know.

One area that has seen power, and use, is that of cell phones. These devices have made a big splash in connectivity over the last few years, and with the iPhone giving some impetus in the US market to more capable devices, I think we will see the phone companies forced into providing some of the features and cost structures that other parts of the world enjoy.

Recently I noticed that some companies are now selling RAID disk devices directly to the home user. This is a huge step forward in the direction of amalgamating users data, and backing it up, or at least keeping it safe. These devices mount on a home network. With homes gaining a mix of wireless and wired devices, including digital cameras, cellphone features, laptops and even desktops, and even HD Tivos, there is a growing need for reliable large disk capacity. All those mp3's, downloaded videos, cell phone recorded videos, and electronic personal documents need a good, secure home.

The fringes

Out there, on the far side, is a new technology that could offer many interesting opportunities : Quantum Computing. The development of new devices to do Quantum computing is in it's infancy (think what Microprocessors were like in 1976.)

The first multi-qubit processors were announced late this year. These will afford people the opportunity to look at the technology and start to get the ball rolling. We have traditional views of how to program these things as of yet, but when the hit the mainstream, which may occur for some high end universities this year, I believe we have to start rethinking what computer programming is going to be about.