2018

Thanks to a cool service called Twine and some one named Kevin Makice, I found this post predicting what the cloud computing market will look like in 10 years.

A long time ago I heard my boss's boss, Hugh Ryan at (then) Andersen Consulting, quote some one who said something like "Anyone with the audacity to predict the future lacks the credibility to be believed." I can't find that exact quote anywhere; if any readers can give me its source I would really appreciate it.

Given the wisdom of that quote, here are my predictions for the competition in various enterprise IT markets in 2018:

PCs and PC hardware:

• Apple merged with Acer, Dell, Lenovo, and/or one or more lesser known Asian manufacturers
• several vendors of ultra-cheap presentation layer devices that will hardly be called PCs (try googling 3270)

Servers (this market will be small):

• HP
• Sun (possibly merged with the hardware-making portions of Google)
• IBM (possibly merged with HP or EMC)
  
• EMC

Phones/Smart devices: competition between:

• Apple
• Nokia

Privacy- and security- focused services/clouds:

• Microsoft merged with ADP, either Oracle or SAP, and a bunch of tiny fodder
  
• Amazon
• eBay
• Google
  

Throughput- and functionality- focused services/clouds:

• Google
• Google merged with Salesforce
• Google merged with Sun
• Google merged with Salesforce and Sun
• Google merged with Salesforce, Sun, Oracle, SAP, Blackwater, BP, Eli Lilly, Philip Morris, and Waste Management

Airlines:

• Amtrak
• Union Pacific