Predictions for 2009

With the year coming to a close soon, predictions about the next year seem appropriate. These are my five predictions for 2009. More may come later. In addition, there are ten things I would like to happen in 2009 which will also be posted later.

1. Touchscreen netbooks in the sub $350 price range will be available some time next year. This feels very scifi but it is practical, useful, and very likely. Intel has already demoed just such a device, its only a matter of time.

2. Windows 7 will be a big success, but Apple's market share will continue growing at a slower rate. I've been using first build 6801 and then build 6956 as my main os for quite some time, and it is a really amazing improvement over Vista, which is already a good produce. Apple will continue to gain market share, primarily because of their extremely effective advertising campaign. Some time later, maybe in 2010, Microsoft will start gaining marketshare back from Apple, or at least Apple will stop gaining on Microsoft.

3. Developers will really start accelerating programs with GPU processing. This has begun to a certain extent, but not on a large scale. The only good example of this is its implementation in Adobe Photoshop CS4. Hopefully processing done by video transcoders and distributed computing projects will continue to rely more and more on the graphics card.

4. The Playstation 3 will fall farther behind the Xbox 360 and Wii in the console wars. The Wii has a great control system and really fun games. Perhaps more importantly, it caters to a market that was previously almost non-existent, casual gaming. By its very definition this gives the Wii a huge market. The Xbox 360 caters traditionally to the more serious gamers, however it has made an effort into the casual market as well. It will increase its marketshare as more and more gamers are persuaded from both the PC and PS3 to the Xbox 360 by games like Fable 2, Gears of War 2(Amazing!), and the long awaited Halo Wars. The PS3 is a great piece of hardware with many uses outside of gaming, but the lack of good games is killing the platform.

5. Intel will introduce a 32nm line of processors, and will continue to gain on AMD. Intel has been gaining marketshare from AMD for some time. It all, arguably, started with the AMD-ATI merger. The merger left AMD with very little money and a bit of a reorganizing problem. In the time that it will take AMD to move to the 45nm manufacturing process, Intel will in all likelihood have moved to the 22nm process. This gives Intel a huge advantage where performance per watt and design flexibility are concerned.