% fortune -ae paul murphy

Top ten predictions for 2006

Hey, everybody's got a list... so in no particular order:

1. The EU's grumbling about Microsoft will continue to be largely irrelevant.

2. Apple will end its Intel relationship.

3. "C" will make a comeback as a politically correct development language.

4. Sun will continue as an active co-conspirator in the limitation of its Sun Ray markets by continuing to call it a thin client instead of a smart display.

5. By the end of the year IBM will have installed at least a dozen cell based supercomputer grids - and however many are tested before the top 500 list comes out, that's how many of the top spots they'll hold.

6. In the English speaking world Desktop Linux will remain about where it is now - better, but not much more widespread outside Asia where it will, by year's end, be visibly on its way to dominance.

7. Throughout the year we'll be treated to pundits writing knowingly about Web 3 and 4 without anyone having any idea what web 2 is, or was, and who, if anyone, ever characterised the limits to web 1.0 - whatever that is or was.

8. This will finally be the year VoIP becomes a budget driver for IT - with reduced communications costs leaving a surplus in IT hands as funds get transferred from nearly invisible telecom budgets to highly scrutinised IT budgets.

9. By the end of year we'll be hearing about a new Microsoft OS that runs only on Xenon and builds networks out of "smart particles" that look a lot like stripped BSD kernels.

10. By the end of the year there will be both criminal and civil law precedents or credible cases in process, in the United States, supporting the belief that companies or organizations who, like the US National Security Agency last month (which didn't know what its Windows Web Server upgrades did) install software whose functioning they neither understand nor control are nevertheless liable for its operation.