Windows 8: Office killer app

Now that Microsoft Windows 8 is globally available many people wonder if it will be the next Windows Vista or the next Mobile 5. Well, I am not that pessimistic and I am sure W8 will be adopted by at least 50% of the desktop users. As tablet use increases in enterprises, I am confident W8 tablets will gain its share. Ok, it will never outnumber iPads (not even reach 10% market share), but the full Office license will be the killer app for touch tablets. This is where we were waiting for, it is the next step for laptop users and a cool step.
So my predICTion is that more than 60% of laptop users will swap it for a touch tablet with W8 within 4 years!

Pred-ICT-ion: Layar.com is heading the wrong AR direction

Layar (www.layar.com) started as a very succesfull augmented reality company, by launching their layar browser and content services. But, nowadays, they are fully focussing on adding digital content to print. And in my opinion, that is a great mistake. They should deliver the best environment for augmented reality content creation, for in the near future several interesting devices will become available for consumers, like smart digital windows, AR-glasses and other see-through equipment. My pred-ICT-ion is that Layar will lose ground to companies like Google and Microsoft within 2 years and. I don't understand why Layar is directing to digital print. Pressure of their investors....?

Coders are a dying breed?

Last week our company Centric held a so-called RAD-race, a one-night competition for developers to show their skills on their favorite development platforms. The technology used by our developers is listed below:

1. Microsoft C# .Net using Centric proprietary software factory
2. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 + NinTex
3. Pronto / Bre4all: Centric proprietary software factory, model driven, 4GL-like
4. Microsoft LightSwitch
5. Grails, high-productivity web framework based on the Groovy language
6. <m_twize>: Centric proprietary software factory, model driven, 4GL-like
7. Mendix, see website, agile application development without coding
8. Microsoft C#.Net + NuGet

The assigment consisted of 3 parts:

1. Develop an application for registering software components
1. All CRUD functions
2. Additional processes like alerting owners, requests for change
2. Add multi-tenancy to the application
1. Security is important
3. Add connections to Twitter, Yammer or Facebook

The winning team used SharePoint 2010 with NinTex. Second team used...SharePoint 2010 with NinTex. Third team used Mendix. These teams didn't produce a single line of code!
Our proprietary software factories failed to integrate with social media, but did well for the remainder. The teams using LightSwitch and Grails finished last.

As the one who created the assignment I was really surprised. Can coding no longer keep up with modern development frameworks? We did not perform scientific research nor did we try more complicated tests. But the results made me think.
Let me add a pred-ICT-ion: within 5 years application development will be a practice performed without coding. Coding will be needed to build the frameworks application developers will use and programming will become a high-level profession only a few will attain.

Pred-ICT-ion: html5 and server-sent events: a way to port real winforms userinterfaces to the browser

Html5's server-sent events http://dev.w3.org/html5/eventsource/ break in my opinion one of the fundamental design requirements of internet technology for browsing documents. Preventing servers from sending events to the browser took care of many security threads. I suppose and expect that html5's implementation by the various organizations like Mozilla will be very secure.
So, from then we can build real interactive userinterfaces as we are used to in client/server applications. I expect the first port of winforms (with server-sent events, no polling of server data!) in 2013 by Microsoft.

Pred-ICT-ion: The HTML5 boom is coming. Fast

In July 22nd, 2011 Colleen Taylor states at her blog at http://gigaom.com/2011/07/22/the-html5-boom-is-coming-fast/ that Flash will very soon be replaced by html5/css3. Although html5/css3 is key for Apple, it is not as rich as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight at this moment. But we all know that these developments are not about functionality but about adoption by the public and the availability of killer apps. So, it is hard to predict when html5/css3 will supercede Flash/Silverlight, but that it is growing fast is undeniable.

My prediction is that in 2013 html5/css3 will be rich enough to be a substitue for 80% of the flash applications.

Using Xbox Kinect for business applications?

In Microsoft's Evolving Vision of the Cloud Michael Otey hopes in June '11 that the use of the Xbox Kinect for IT never materializes.

M. Otey:

We all saw Minority Report and Tom Cruise with the cool virtual monitor, but who really wants to have to connect their Xbox to a business system and wave their hands at it? Not me. The cloud seems like it could be the real future of computing, but the Kinect just seems like a desperate attempt to try to be cool. Hand waving is never good for demos, and I don’t think it’s going to replace the mouse anytime soon.

I personally think he's wrong at this point. My company for instance is developing solutions for healthcare, where kinect technology helps patients do their excercises in the right way. Medics can analyze the data instead of hoping the patients did the right thing.
We will see!