What will the future have to offer

About 10 years ago, in the peak of the boom times (around 2001) I was asked to make a prediction as to what the future would hold for computers. Keep in mind, this was in the time when hard disks were 20-30G and flash drives were new. If your flash drive was more than 100mb we knew you had spent big money on it.....


I am still surprised my prediction is not a reality yet, but it appears to be heading in the right direction. There is an ever decreasing reliance on desktop and laptop computers, and more emphasis on really mobile devices.
I thought the PDA was the platform that would take over the world - but mobile phones have the advantage of the wide network coverage that PDAs simply could not break the tether to the docking station. At the time, it was becoming obvious that the data is the key - being able to carry your data around - and preferably access it while moving is what we are all looking for. Mobile phones and the cloud computing are starting to bridge this gap. The iTablet is moving even closer.....


So what is missing?
The big thing that I thought would have taken off in the past 10 years is voice recognition. Think of all the cool movies from the past 20 years - the computers all talk to us and we talk to them, but in reality, we are still along way from this in day to day life. Finally graphics, storage and processing power are becoming readily available and cheap, the missing link is being able to interact with the data in a way that is more natural to us - voice. Lets face it we do not naturally type, our first forms of communication are touch and speech. If voice recognition systems develop over the next 5 years, then the concept of the iTablet (think much smaller, flexible screen and faster wireless access anywhere all the time) will be the next killer system.


The cloud means we do not need to all have very powerful systems, we simply make use of the cloud as we need it, and when we do not need it, we release the resources to others. This only works if network bandwidth increases and latency drops.


We are at a critical point in terms of technology, the furthest we can predict into the future is 2 years - and even then it is fuzzy. If my prediction of voice recognition taking off over the next 5 years comes to being, the whole face of what we currently think of as a computer  will change.


The final point I will make in this post is video projection - something I did not consider important 5 years ago - it was just used to project marketing material on walls ...... but now it too is becoming mobile and small. Look at the laser projected keyboard, works on many surfaces - for now it is a toy, in the future, maybe you can carry around your 24in projection screen in your pocket....

The importance of communication

Communication is a wonderful thing. Without it so many things go so wrong.
When people assume things on a project (particularly an IT project) and 'forget' to ask for things such as reports or logins, things tend to turn pear shaped.... why are people surprised by this!