Near misses and lost opportunities: Application development in 2011

Playing pundit is never easy. Things move too quickly in modern life. For example, a few years ago, the experts warned that the euro was on the verge of eclipsing the U.S. dollar as the preferred currency of the global economy. Now they’re saying Europe’s current financial woes could trigger the collapse of the European Union itself. Should we believe them this time?

The tech world moves even faster. It’s hard to tell what’s coming in the next six months, let alone further ahead. But that doesn’t stop countless columnists from weighing in each December with their predictions for the year to come, and I’m no exception.

Longtime readers, however, will recall that I like to play this game with a difference: accountability! I don’t let my past prognostications lie — no, I like to drag them out and air them for all to see how right or wrong I was, and that’s what I’m doing this week.

Looking back on my predictions for 2011, I see a vision of the future that was rather downbeat, even pessimistic. Unfortunately, it appears I was more right than wrong.

Java soldiered onward, despite struggles

I admit I got off to a bad start, blowing my first prediction completely. In the wake of the Apache Foundation quitting the Java Community Process in protest, I expected other parties to follow suit throughout 2011. I’m happy to report that this didn’t happen; in fact, with work moving ahead on Java 8 and 9, the community seems stronger than ever. Mea culpa, though to be fair, I wasn’t the only one — Forrester predicted Oracle would dismantle the JCP altogether.

I also predicted Google would cozy up to the Apache Foundation in public support of a more open Java. That didn’t really happen, either — but maybe only because Oracle beat Google to the punch. In May, the database giant subpoenaed the Apache Foundation for documents it claims will prove that Google’s Android OS willfully violates Oracle intellectual property. Since then, Google’s relationship with the Apache Foundation has remained cordial, but not overtly chummy.

Otherwise, I thought Oracle’s ongoing litigation against Google would have little direct impact on the smartphone market, and that proved true. The steady stream of new Android smartphones continues unabated.

Still, I thought all of the uncertainty about Java would be worrying for Google, spurring it to continue its work on Go, the company’s new systems programming language. I said to expect “a quiet beta release” in 2011, and I was essentially right. Instead of one beta, Google issued several high-quality “release” versions throughout the year, and it now says it plans to ship Go 1.0 in early 2012.

Crunch time for mobile platforms

For Google’s competitors in the mobile market, I predicted 2011 would signal the beginning of the shakeout, and that definitely seems to be true.

Research in Motion has been struggling to maintain its position in the enterprise smartphone market for some time now. I expected 2011 would see RIM finally take action by announcing a new, unified OS for all of its future handsets and tablets, based on the QNX technology it acquired in 2010. I was right on the money, and after some trademark troubles, we now know the new OS will be called BlackBerry 10. Unfortunately it may be too little, too late, as the first BlackBerry 10 handsets won’t ship until late 2012.

As much as Hewlett-Packard should have come out fighting with WebOS, I predicted it wouldn’t, and I was right again. HP did both more and less than I expected. It shipped two WebOS smartphones when I expected none, although their sales figures were even shabbier than I predicted the Pre 2’s would be. What I didn’t expect was for HP to admit its WebOS efforts were a failure so quickly. Just one month after shipping its HP TouchPad tablet, it scrapped its entire WebOS hardware line.

Instead of WebOS, I expected HP to do an about-face and become Microsoft’s premier partner for Windows Phone 7. Maybe it could have, had it moved quickly enough. Instead, that role went to Nokia, which had fewer qualms about abandoning its own MeeGo OS than HP had about letting go of WebOS. But although I got Microsoft’s hardware partner wrong, I got the result right. So far, Microsoft’s best efforts have failed to gain much traction for Windows Phone.

The vice tightened on the Net

Other than Java and the mobile market, the rest of my predictions for 2011 involved the legal climate surrounding the Internet and what it would mean for application developers.

In particular, network bandwidth throttling, data caps, and overage fees were all on my mind, and I predicted we’d see more of these in 2011. Not surprisingly, I was right. Verizon Wireless dropped unlimited data plans for its smartphones in July and Sprint followed suit in October, while AT&T and T-Mobile both began throttling the bandwidth of customers who exceed a preset cap. I predicted the practice would spread to wired broadband users in 2011, and I was right again.

I cautioned not to expect any new rulings from Washington on these matters, nor any new laws related to Internet governance. Predictably, that was the case. What I didn’t expect, though, was how close Congress came to acting and how damaging the results might have been. The House passed a measure that would have rolled back FCC Net neutrality regulations instituted in 2010, and the Senate almost did the same. Meanwhile, House Republicans drafted a bill that would have eliminated Net neutrality requirements for future broadband spectrum auctions. While I was right, it was a close call.

Another close call: In July, the House drafted a bill in the name of protecting children from online pornographers, but which the ACLU described as “a direct assault on the privacy of Internet users.” I predicted that one, too. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of this kind of legislation.

All in all, I don’t think my track record for my 2011 predictions was too shabby. But what do you think? Did I fail to foresee any major events of 2011 that were relevant to software developers? Let me know (Add a comment), and be sure to come back next week to find out my predictions for 2012.

This article, “Near misses and lost opportunities: Application development in 2011,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Neil McAllister’s Fatal Exception blog and follow the latest news in programming at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.