Let the Cloudwashing Continue… …And Other Big Themes for 2012

In all, I’ve identified five themes for 2012, the overarching ideas that will frame discussions throughout the year.

I. Let the Cloudwashing Continue
It must be annoying as hell to be heads-down for a few years developing an exquisite multi-tenant, metered, scalable, flexible, distributed cloud service or platform, only to have all the legacy IT guys jump in and say they have seen the light and are now cloud vendors, too. Thus, the cloudwashing fingerpointing begins.

It is surely even more aggravating when said legacy vendors define the cloud however they please, then make the recursive argument that they can define cloud as they want because there’s no precise definition of cloud.

Yet, we should consider the customer-IT, which is famous for furious pushback against the latest magical elixir, whether it’s client-server, AJAX, SOA, or BPM. Cloud is just the latest in an endless buzzword stream IT buyers, developers, and deployers must navigate.

By tagging certain of their assets as cloud, the legacy vendors are making it easier for IT to accept the term. In doing so, they will no doubt learn which approaches fly best in their enterprises. The bolder ones will gravitate towards the things we might label as "more cloudy."

But in a world where IT is faced with an either/or legacy-or-cloud decision, it’s not going to venture far into the sky. IT will not allow vendors who claim philosophical purity to cram things down their throats. Cloud computing will be adopted more quickly, and will become "the way we do things" because legacy vendors are easing the transition-let’s call it cloudeasing rather than cloudwashing.

II. Big Data Redefined
If you’ve hated the expanding definition of cloud computing, get ready for the sequel: Big Data redefine. Long the province of the true geekery involved in simulations of nuclear bombs, epidemiology, and the weather, Big Data is coming to mean any sort of data flow (not just capture) that looks big to a particular organization.

Ubiquitous computing has turned into ubiquitous telemetry and data collection, and the new Big Data has emerged, along for the ride. Cloud computing and Big Data are part of each other’s Boolean circles, and will become ever more so as their respective definitions continue to loosen.

Tell me, what is your Big Data problem, and to whom are you going to turn to solve it?

III. Too Much Social Is Still Not Enough
We can see the lines blurring when we consider that social media are driving part of the Big Data phenomenon. At the same time, it seems a lot of people are already calling "game over" when it comes to the dominance of Facebook and its (hardee har har) $100 billion valuation.

The argument runs along the lines of Facebook (and to some degree, Twitter, LinkedIn, and maybe Google+) have blotted out the sun; there is no room left for another damned social-media company.

But to me, this argument is analogous to the idea that everybody in Europe and North America loved chocolate candy when it was first introduced in the 19^th century, and there was no room for innovation after about 1900. Even today there’s room for a bitchin’ new type of candy bar.

I don’t see a huge, long-term first-move advantage in social either, particularly since its primary business model is still Google’s business model (and dependent on Google to boot): Sell a lot of ads based on minuscule clickthrough rates. Add in the "Christmas toy factor" (kids get tired of their Christmas toys quickly), and it seems that the history of social has only just begun.

More targeted social ideas-whether activity-based, or built around a specific business usage-should gain traction, especially as they now have not only the desktop, but a proliferation of mobile devices through which they can reach people 24/7/365.

IV. The Year of Apping Dangerously
Speaking of those mobile devices, who in hell really knows what will happen in 2012? I certainly don’t.

It’s easy enough to offer profound insights such as "RIM is dead," "W7 Phones have no chance," "Droid’s divergence is its fatal flaw," or "Apple has lost its edge." Much harder to be working somewhere within this massive ecosystem trying to make things happen while blotting out all the white noise.

Who knows, maybe the two RIM guys will move to an ashram, see a bunch of gods, and come back with renewed religious fervor. Maybe a real keyboard will make a comeback. Maybe Google will buy Nokia in a hostile takeover. Maybe Samsung will buy Microsoft (although unlikely in an election year). Maybe webOS will make a miraculous, open-sourced recovery. Who knows? Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.

We do know that smartphone growth will continue. The questions will be, what’s the danger in buying a type of product that might be discontinued soon, and where do developers place their bets?

Within this growth, it seems there will be a market for ultra-high-end devices if the vendors don’t get all OWS-squeamish about things, and a very large low-end to middle market in developing nations. Synopsizing the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid strategy, poor people like nice stuff, too. Smartphone and tablets are not only nice, they provide a digital lifeline to friends, family, and the world.

Which leads to the final theme…

V. IT’s Eternal Disruption
A pack of unruly seventh graders is not as disruptive as IT. Seen through the lens of social media, IT was given much credit for the disruption of the Arab Spring revolutions.

It seems clear that these events were not Twitter or Facebook Revolutions, but it seems equally clear that IT-in the guise of smart devices, the software that gives them life, and bandwidth-will continue to be a disruptive force. Be warned that said disruption is agnostic, and could happen in any nation that is facing issues of economic instability and perceived inequitability. In other words, it could happen in any nation.

The days of IT trends hitting the US first, Western Europe 18 months later, Japan another two years later–and the rest of the world be damned–are over. The latest cool stuff gets into the hands of people almost simultaneously throughout the world today, and those hands are often connected to unhappy people.

A generation ago, people in so-called third-world countries would see the wealth of the West and aspire to it someday. Today, people in developing and developed countries alike aspire to getting what they want now, using the powerful tools our industry has created over the past decade.