Mobile + Cloud — Gartner’s Crystal Ball

Late December and early January see the seasonal appear­ance of a popular type of blog post: ‘My Predictions for [Next Year]’. They’re a great stock-​​in-​​trade because you can say whatever you like and nobody can prove you wrong until the end of the fol­lowing year, by which time everyone’s for­gotten. I’ve written a couple in the past, but refrained this year, leaving the task to wiser heads than mine.

Heads such as those at analyst firm Gartner, which has just produced its own vari­ation on the theme:  Key Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2010 and Beyond. Since they get paid thou­sands of pounds by busi­nesses to be correct about the future, Gartner doesn’t offer many 12-​​month pre­dic­tions, with several stretching to the six-​​year level – even high-​​paying sub­scribers won’t remember by 2015. ;-)

Anyway, the bold bits are from the press release. The regular text is my attempt at a quip or reaction.

By 2012, 20 percent of busi­nesses will own no IT assets.

Quite a lot of busi­nesses own very few IT assets right now. The phone is still the key com­mu­nic­a­tions tool for plenty of bricks-​​and-​​mortar firms. But what Gartner is talking about is the Cloud, of course, or – more pro­sa­ic­ally – leasing arrange­ments. I’m not entirely sure I buy this. I can see that there will be fewer server rooms, more leasing and more thin devices, but no IT assets is quite a stretch. As I under­stand it, most leased IT at present is basic­ally the big printers that have come to replace pho­to­copiers, which were always leased anyway.

By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integ­ra­tion and Web socialization.

A safer bet here, I think – with 350mn sub­scribers already, Facebook could already make this claim to some extent. But Gartner is bolder than this looks – it means all web social­isa­tion. That other social networks and websites will have to offer Facebook integ­ra­tion to survive. This goes against the common wisdom that the incum­bent dominant social network will even­tu­ally go the way of Friendster, Six Degrees and Friends Reunited as fresher networks attract the restless young.

Nonetheless, I’m rel­at­ively happy with the sug­ges­tion that Facebook will remain a dominant force. I see more and more websites with Facebook Connect installed. I even installed a module allowing users to log into this site to make comments using their Facebook account. Albeit an open-​​standards model that will work with other OpenID providers.

It will be inter­esting to see how this pans out inter­na­tion­ally, though. While Facebook dom­in­ates in English-​​speaking coun­tries, there’s con­sid­er­ably more flux and variety else­where. Maybe Gartner meant “in the US”, though the text doesn’t say that.

Internet mar­keting will be reg­u­lated by 2015, con­trolling more than $250 billion in Internet mar­keting spending worldwide.

Woah. That’s a big push – but remember they’ve got six years for it to happen or for us all to forget. There are a couple of problems with Internet mar­keting reg­u­la­tion: (1) it already is reg­u­lated. Companies have to operate to the same stand­ards they do in offline dealings. (2) But it’s reg­u­lated by local laws.Suing a dodgy dealer in Timbuktu in a UK court is all very well, but you still won’t get that herbal vi-​​gr– you ordered. (3) Increasing local reg­u­la­tion tends to be unpop­ular because it puts local busi­nesses at a dis­ad­vantage compared to those in Timbuktu.

By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult pop­u­la­tion will be able to transact elec­tron­ic­ally via mobile or Internet technology.

I can buy this. If anything, I think it will happen quicker. There are already 4bn mobile phones in use. The next iPhone is tipped to incor­porate near-​​field com­mu­nic­a­tions. People change their phones at least every 18 months – so now everyone’s got at least a cam­er­a­phone with bluetooth. Chip-​​readers should surely become standard within two generations.

By 2015, context will be as influ­en­tial to mobile consumer services and rela­tion­ships as search engines are to the Web.

Pretty vague, but context here means the use of location, time, the accel­er­o­meter, near-​​field com­mu­nic­a­tions etc. So if I am walking into Tesco at six-o’clock, the phone loads an appro­priate shopping portal that I can wave at the things I want to buy and reminds me to get washing powder, that sort of thing. And why not? Tesco has already got this sort of thing for desktops and ded­ic­ated appli­ances. If my mobile is four-​​generations better, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t have it there.

By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

As I’ve men­tioned above, there are already 4bn mobile phones in cir­cu­la­tion, versus about 1.5bn PCs. If those phones are two gen­er­a­tions better, then they can probably do an OK job of ren­dering the web, maybe through micro-​​projectors and gesture recog­ni­tion.

I’ll finish, though, with this video of mobile guru Tomi Ahonen about the next 4bn mobile users. One key point he makes is that the next 4bn are probably in devel­oping nations and that they’ll still be using SMS and WAP for some time to come (he’s not very sanguine about the mobile web, full stop) – thus the biggest revenue oppor­tun­ities for busi­nesses aren’t the mobile web at all, but in far more down-​​to-​​earth, but uni­ver­sally usable applications.

photo credit: Panoramas

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