Happy New Year. As is traditional around this time of year, the tech blogs are full of all sorts of predictions for what the coming year may bring. As a teenager, I had a passing interest in anthropology, company reports and a strong interest in technology: as a result, at one point I aspired to be a futurologist, and whilst I can’t claim that I made it, I can let a few predictions out now for 2007.

Hardware

I think it likely that Apple will make great strides in 2007. I’m expecting an Apple mobile phone along with a small form factor computer to fill in the gaping hole left by the lack of a 12” Powerbook in their line-up. This will be either a 12” Macbook Pro, or possibly a tablet, perhaps with a smaller screen. In addition, 8-core Mac Pros are widely touted, as is the already announced iTV, which I expect to emerge with better Video-on-demand services here in the UK.

Video-On-Demand is going to be a big player in 2007 in the UK with BT, Sky, ntl:Telewest and others all edging into the market, hoping to get in front of YouTube before they sign deals with broadcasters and content owners. By year end, it should be possible to buy for a smallish fee a programme without advertising embedded in it. If they’re clever about using their back catalogue, broadcasters and content-owners will be attempting to chase Apple and the record labels down the long tail.

Software

We’ll see substantial upgrades to a range of operating systems, however the real winner will be Linux and other open source operating systems. Vista will not fly as consumers realise the price tag for the software plus necessary hardware upgrade doesn’t buy them anything of real value.

Those who do upgrade this year will be looking at cheaper solutions with Ubuntu gaining market share or possibly switching to an OS more tailored for a living-room setting by moving to an iMac with FrontRow installed. Apple will leverage consumer-friendly hardware, combined with consumer/family-focused enhancements in Leopard to make substantial in-roads into the home PC market. Microsoft will want to follow them, but after being bitten badly by Zune will take time to find their courage - it may be we see a management shake-up at Microsoft in order to keep on top.

Firefox will gain market share, and increasingly as people become aware of other open source offerings, some of the more mature tools out there will start gaining share. OpenOffice and similar well-developed open-source tools will gain audience and open source will become more familiar in corporate IT departments.

The Web

I think we’re going to see a paradigm shift in search once more and whilst I don’t think it will come from Google, they will be quick to buy up the tech and integrate it. I’m not sure where this is going to come from, but it’s likely to be natural language and will combine huge improvements in machine translation of foreign language material that is just over the horizon.

The Web 2.0 fiscal bubble will burst, but the technology will stick. It will no longer be enough to talk about ‘collective intelligence’ or ‘social networks’, as these concepts will now be baked into web applications in much the same way SSL payment gateways are now. It will just disappear as a business model in itself, but the tech will hang around and we’ll see a year of creative tinkering around the edges.

I suspect Adobe’s Apollo will be a much talked-about release however at first, we developers won’t know what to do with it. It will go through a stage that Flash did where people use it for the sake of using it, until it matures and then I think it will contribute to a new era of local application and web application integration that will mean we no longer talk about thick/thin clients, but instead talk about data being in the right place at the right time for the right purpose.

Microformats will take a leap forward and some attempts will be made to formalise them through some kind of standards body. This will fail, as all standards bodies eventually become gargantuan behemoths that nobody wants to play with. Instead, more chaotic standards will emerge and popularism and effectiveness will start to replace academic philosophy in terms of determining the right standards for the Web to follow.

Mobile web access will take off with improved WiFi and WiMax connectivity, combined with better data tariffs from mobile phone companies. We’ll see an uptake in Skype and similar free/flat-rate services on mobile devices and mobile companies will start to look to diversify their business model. Advertising to handsets will be resisted by consumers and won’t take off.

Talking about advertising, I think in 2007 the click-fraud problem will finally hit home and the advertising revenue model on the Internet (and elsewhere) will finally start to collapse properly. As a result, more services will charge the consumer directly.

Programming

I’m a developer, so you’d expect me to concentrate on this area above all others. I’ll tell you something now that it’s taken me nearly 20 years of programming experience to realise: it’s almost futile predicting the programming industry but I’ll give it a whirl.

Agile methods will become the dominant lingua franca of programming as people finally accept that coding is a design process, not an engineering process. Those who try to control projects using methods similar to those used to build bridges and tunnels will hopefully begin to realise the futility of their intent, and adapt, wholesale. Those who are left behind will be considered an anachronism within the industry, and quite rightly will probably end up going bankrupt. Those who adapt early will flourish. The industry will take a quantum leap forward as a result, and we’ll finally get some respectability around here.

Bespoke design and development web-shops will struggle and the industry will move more to producing components within niches that can quickly be bolted together with niche experience to deliver tailor-fit services. Instead of going to a ‘web design company’ for a site, by the end of 2007 we’ll see clients starting to go to specialists such as a team specialising in educational sites for e-learning portals, or specialists in social video media if they want the next YouTube. It will no longer be sufficient to know a language or framework - developers will need to start to know market sectors just as well in order to survive and distinguish themselves from the crowd of cheap coders with just as good an education from abroad.

Costs of development will come down, and programmers are going to have to start adjusting towards tailoring in the mass market to survive. This will only start in 2007 - it’ll take 3-4 years for it have a major impact on the industry.

Let me just repeat: virtually everything in this industry is unpredictable.

Society

Most people don’t know this, but in my spare time I’m a bit of a politico and I like to follow general societal trends. I’ll pop a few of these predictions in here to give you more material with which to mock me in January 2008…

Gordon Brown will struggle to become the next PM and I expect at least John Reid to come out to the fight, as rank and file Labour party members and MPs realise that Brown can’t win a general election, no matter how badly the Tories mess up their policy announcements this year. Thanks to the funding debacle all parties will try and find a way to re-connect to membership and we’ll see a shift to a more American-style political fund-raising method.

The EU Constitution will get a kick in the pants and will be on the agenda again by mid-2007. Angela Merkel who takes charge of the EU presidency and the G8 at the same time for the first half of the year will probably move towards producing a slimmed-down version, with a wider appeal to the citizenship.

We might see a crash caused by consumer debt but I think it will effect the house price market only by way of a slow-down thanks to most of the inflation in the market being caused by buy-to-let investors as opposed to over-committed owners. I think China will grow it’s GDP by about 10% once again, but this will be its last year of such rampant growth for a while: the money going in will slow down after the Beijing 2008 Olympics, and they’re already in a position of being able to over-supply world demand for their manufacturing goods.

Environmentalism will be front and centre for 2007, with all countries, including the USA, putting it at the top of the agenda with a possibility of an international carbon tax being floated around. CFL lightbulbs will become standard and it will become increasingly hard to find ‘standard’ lightbulbs by the end of 2007. LEDs have potential, but are too dim to be used outside niche applications such as traffic lights, car headlights, etc. We’ll see at least one new form of renewable energy, distinguishable from wind, solar, etc. get announced in 2007 although hook-up to the grid will take another 2-3 years.

Like everybody else on the planet, I think Iraq will head into full-blown civil war but where I differ to most analysts is that I expect Iran will end up extending their borders and taking control of at least part of Iraq.

Finally, a prediction for 2008 some way out: Barack Obama will become the 44th President of the United States