Traditionally we have always done a ‘Predictions’ piece sometime just
before year’s end. In it we take our crystal balls firmly in hand, don
our silicon turban and prognosticate on the future of various aspects
of the tech industry.
This year we didn’t.
We just weren’t seeing
anything that exciting on the horizon and we made an editorial decision
to wait until after the first salvo of trade shows to see if there was
something we were missing and go from there. Well we’ve had 6 weeks or
so to settle into 2008, take a deep breath and scope out the industry.
There are some exciting things happening, such as the bid by
Microsoft to acquire Yahoo and the ever improving and proliferating
tools to put more and more and more (and more) content on the web. To
that end, we have asked two of our resident wizards, Analyst Amy Wohl and Contributing Editor Stan Coplan
to give us their take on the areas of mergers and acquisitions, SAAS
(software as a service), and all those neat development tools for the
web. All that being said, as far as hardware is concerned, I still feel
that 2008 will be….
Already, it’s gotten off to a tumultuous start in the M&A area with Microsoft’s hostile offer to purchase Yahoo for $31 per share in cash and stock, originally worth about $44.6 billion (worth somewhat less now, in a falling stock market). Yahoo has been looking (unsuccessfully, we think) for a white knight. Most knights don’t have $50 Billion plus horses. So we suspect Microsoft will slightly sweeten the deal – financial analysts suggest to $35 per share – and take the prize. The question is what they’ll do with it.
{A little over 2 years ago Adobe systems bought Macromedia and added their Flash software to an already impressive repertoire of applications. Since then, there has been much discussion regarding what direction Adobe would take with this very popular development platform. Contributing Editor Stan Coplan adds his thoughts and expands on the web development tools sector for 2008. ed}
If you were worried about what Adobe would do with Macromedia's Flash and other tools fear not. Thermo is on the way. Will Thermo replace Flash? From what I can tell the answer is no. Thermo will produce output that feeds Flex Builder. Flex Builder is an Adobe programming tool used to produce the SWF files that play in flash. Thermo will take your layered Photoshop files as input and produce MXML (XAML) output for use in Flex Builder. MXML and XAML and similar XML formats are used to describe a user interface (UI) in a human readable but very structured format.
As part of the conversion process it is easy to transform a text field from Photoshop into a text-input field for Flex Builder. In fact there are many possible transformations available. This makes it very easy to convert a graphic design directly into a mix of graphics and programming components. So the hand-off from design to programming should be very smooth, much better than what we have available today, if Thermo lives up to its promise. It’s possible that MXML and XAML will replace CSS, and the browser will become a container for Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight. Of course, that could all be changed by new products like Adobe AIR that bridge the desktop-web divide.
For those of you who might not have caught the news feed, SunRocket,
the 4th largest voice over IP (VOIP) phone service provider, ceased
operations Monday, July 16th. In itself, this is not a monumental event. Companies
close their doors all the time. Sometimes it’s the competition,
sometimes poor management and sometimes it’s just the right time to
retire from the corporate battlefield, thank your customers and say
goodbye. But sometimes, just sometimes you get to see a company miss
the mark completely. If you couple that with a complete lack of respect
for the marketplace and its customers, you’ve got SunRocket.
Software as a Service is coming of age. Nine years ago, when we asked SMBs if they'd be interested in using on-line software (instead of traditional, on your desktop or server packages), no one knew what we were talking about. Today, 70% of organizations are using or plan to use some SaaS within the next 12 months.
The industry analysts who make quantitative predictions believe that by 2010 25% or more of all new software will be purchased as a service. We think that might be an underestimate, especially for the SMB market.
Security, identity theft, corporate espionage and a litany of similar issues are at the heart of many companies IT strategies. The more sensitive the data the more vital the security measures. Often, in the mad scramble to erect firewalls, supplement password protocols, add antivirus and spyware protection and a very simple, yet critical concept is overlooked. That being data encryption.
Considering the number of enterprise and small business users who are using laptops as a primary computer system we thought it essential to shed some light on this subject for our readers. We are posting this month an excerpt from a white paper authored by one of our contributing editors, Howard Lubert, which will help clarify some of the issues related to this significant threat to data security.
~ED~
Perspectives 
