My Year In Review
It has been another year in my life, they just get faster as I grow older. Personally this has been a year full of reflection over my life and how I got here. It has caused me to grow in some very important areas I think. Professionally it has been probably the worst and the best 12 months. This has caused some personal issues as when you own a small business, it almost always interferes with your personal life too much.
Back when I started this Blog I did not really know what to expect, but I knew it could not hurt. It has really been one of the best ventures I have decided to undertake over the last six plus years. I also made some predictions on what I thought 2006 would hold and then followed that up with a mid-year update. I thought I would revisit those predictions one last time before I posted what I think will happen in 2007.
Vista will be released - Yes it will be, in very early 2007. I guess technically it was November 2006 since it was posted on MSDN on black Friday. I still have not had time to install and deal with any upgrade headaches! For us ASP.NET developers, IIS 7 looks like and awsome platform. Makes me anxious for Longhorn to hit.
Convergence - Everywhere. I love all the cell phone commercials that talk about the phones that do just about everything except cook for you. I got a Zune for Christmas and I love it. I have about 20 GB of music and video podcasts on it right now, and they are all organized and quickly accessible. I do reccomend it to everyone. Just a note, it does come in real handy when you are trapped on a Jet on the Shreveport tarmack for 6 hours waiting the Dallas airport to open!
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo duking it out in the search engine wars of 2006. The more I learn about SEO and SEM the more I dislike Google. Personally I tend to find beter results through www.live.com, but Google has only grown in its market share. It is doing it at the expense of it customers and users IMHO. The Microsoft team is trying to make it a good platform, but Google is doing a much better job of branding. Yahoo's brand for all intensive purposes is just not that valuable anymore. But I have to agree with Shoemoney, that Microsoft should and will buy Yahoo in 2007. I think it will be one of the wisest moves any company trying to gain ground in the search space could do. Yahoo still has a viable marketshare and from a Web 2.0 perspective they have a much richer set of web APIs available to developers. The purchase price is still affordable for a company like Microsoft, probably in the 2-6 billion range (I am no M&A expert by any means). The other company Microsoft should buy is CNet, not for the media itself, but for the domain search.com. This is the one domain that any company could purchase that could be branded forever to grab majority of the search world. Google has turned their goofy name into a branded verb at this point, Yahoo had the same priviledge, to a lesser extend in the late 90s. I think Google will be unseeded, but it will take some time and effort. I think it will be primarly because Google makes a series of big mistakes the average user actually understands as a mistake. Right now the mistakes Google makes are so technical and underneath the hood that the average Blockbuster American would never know or understand it.
Search is big - the real money to be made on the internet is by selling advertising on your site. That will remain the case. Selling products and services requires way too much back office effort and for retail physical goods and the management that goes along with it. Search is the backbone of this market since the vast majority of traffic starts with a search engine. Web 2.0 just takes advantage of this mechanism.
Traditional media is moot - and growing more pointless every day. The Major networks are really starting to struggle, magazines and newspapers are dying pretty quick as well. Blogs and other Internet media have claimed their stakes and are growing, fast.
I think the CBS last gassed effort to save the evening news was the pinnicle of proving this point. Poor Katie Couric tried to ganrer a younger, hipper marketshare for the network and revitalize the evening news. It has failed miserably. Only our grandparents watch the evening, stale old news reports. We already know what the new is and we do not have to try and decode the liberal bias that goes along with the network news if we do not want anymore.
Other TV networks have decided to scrap many of their traditional prime time programming because it has become too expensive to produce in the face of decreasing revenue dollars. On the contrary, sites like YouTube make it easy to produce video entertainment and make huge profits. If you watch the Mix '06 keynote, the president of the BBC talks about how much cheaper it is for them to broadcast over the Internet, versus traditional television media. This goes back to convergence. I see many networks are offering the same programs on their web sites they offer over the air now. With Tivo and DVRs, commercials are just a minor annoyance as I skip them and watch 30 minute sitcoms in 17 minutes now, college football games in 45 minutes. You get the point.
China and India will be big - this sort of got quiet as the year progressed. They are big, just not sure what the next big thing will be with them. I think they both got busy internally and did not need us as much!
Loosing weight - well my current contract keeps me on the road communiting too much to consistently get in the gym like I need too. I have gained back about 20 pounds since starting that project. So you will have to see my 2007 predictions and resolutions for what I plan to do.
AJAX - still popular and now Atlas, er I mean ASP.NET Ajax and the accompaning toolkit are just about finalized. This will make things easier to grasp for many, but I think it is a cool thing for developers, our clients on the other hand need to understand what we are offering. The developer/shop that understands how to market this functionality and knows how to program it securely will be sure to reap the finacial rewards for proper AJAX programming.
And NC State's title hopes, well we got Chucked once again. But to paraphrase Gerald R. Ford, our long Wolfpack nightmare is over! Amato and his arogance and poor coaching an recruiting ethics are gone. O'Brien is a coach I would want to play under. As many of you know I was fortunate enough to play for *** Sheridan and Mike O'Cain in the early 90's. Two great college football coaches that taught me and my teammates many great lessons about life that I saw were severely lacking at NC State for the past 7 seasons. So in 2007, we will see what the win loss record holds. As for Sidney Lowe and the basketball team, guys have fun this year, it is not about wins and losses for you guys and we know it.