Next year’s headlines

Microsoft is sued by legions of angry software developers made unemployable by .Net. Steve Jobs branches out of high tech and buys PepsiCo. Martha Stewart begins commenting on Web page aesthetics.

Recently, I hosted a monthly meeting of San Francisco Bay Area CTOs put together by Glenn Ricart, the CTO of CenterBeam. This particular meeting happened to be the first anniversary of the group’s meetings, so Glenn drew up a short series of questions about what lies ahead, putting the attending CTOs into the role of prognosticators. The above cheeky “predictions” aside, their more serious answers provide a telling glimpse of the future from technologists who will likely take part in shaping it.

First, we were asked to predict the biggest technology surprise — the adoption of an obscure technology, the nonadoption of a hyped technology, or some other unexpected twist. For instance, when I forecast out one year from now, I don’t see grid computing in the enterprise for most of us. That is not to say that grid computing is never going to be a factor: Google essentially is already doing grid computing, and I’m certainly keeping an eye on things such as the Globus Project. But for now, it’s on the periphery. We first need to emerge from the internal consolidation that many of us are experiencing before we can dig into the grid.

Some fascinating forecasts emerged. One CTO predicted that in the next year, desktop computers will not be upgraded to the next chip set and features because the pace of Moore’s Law will finally outstrip our need for more computing power. I agree.

Another CTO speculated that wireless hot-spot consolidation will finally make Wi-Fi ubiquitous. Here’s hoping that the United Airlines terminal at O’Hare International Airport — the perennial thorn in my side of Wi-Fi unavailability — takes notice. Still another CTO predicted that government regulation of Internet security at Layer 2 and Layer 3 will spawn a new industry. We’ll see.

The second question posed was, What is going to happen to spam over the next year? Spam was high on everyone’s list, even during the lunch before the meeting. One CTO predicted that spam filters will continue to proliferate and that innovations will emerge for monitoring corporate Internet and e-mail use. One result of that coming true would be that users would begin complaining about legitimate e-mail not getting through. Some CTOs predicted that legislation will finally make a dent, whereas others stated that dedicated spammers will simply continue to move out of the law’s reach.

Although I remain concerned about the impact of spam in terms of wasted computing and network resources, I’m less concerned about its effect on my time these days: We’re using SpamAssassin as a server-side filter at InfoWorld, and I’ve been using Mozilla Mail’s client-side spam filter to handle anything that SpamAssassin misses. I’m seeing only a couple of spam messages a week these days. Regardless, spam is still something we will all be watching.

Will the spam hydra finally be vanquished by aggressive lawmakers and brilliant software developers — or perhaps grid computing? Will Mountain Dew-chugging developers really be sending the proceeds of their unemployment checks to Steve Jobs?

Check back in a year and see.