Happy new 2010!
Looking back at 2009, we can observe some very interesting trends. While some of them were entirely new, the others have been around for a while, therefore one might say they are not specific to 2009.
Nevertheless, I think that they are worth mentioning as well.
Trend number one is the increasing popularity of netbooks. These little devices are eating into both entry-level notebook and desktop markets. Why is that? The answer is very simple – at this point in time they offer the best combination of performance, size and last, but not least – price for a very broad range of consumers.
Let’s face it – majority of users don’t run cpu-heavy applications on a daily basis. The exception to that rule would be gamers, but that’s an entirely different nice market with its own hardware requirements.
Netbooks hit the sweet spot of a computer that can perform 95% of average user’s daily tasks while being very portable and affordable at the same time.
Trend number two is the exploding mobile OS market. So far I can see a trend: if Google is paying attention to something – there is money to be made there soon. In 2009 we saw an explosive growth in Android’s market share and more devices are to follow. The resurrection of Palm with their Pre was an important event as well.
Once again it’s interesting to watch Google’s strategy – apparently Android, while being primarily used in smart phones, is also powering the internet tablets (Archos5, Barnes and Noble nook).
The third trend, which is less visible to end users, but important nevertheless is cloud computing. The model has been around for quite some time – after all peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent and Skype are, in fact, utilizing cloud architecture model. One of the main players on the scene is Amazon with its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).
Of course there were many more interesting things happening in 2009, but I find these were the most visible and industry defining.
