2012 in review: IT vendors prepare for cloudy big-data future
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In the final Patch Monday podcast of 2011, we noted that all the big-picture issues were really just continuations of what had been happening in 2010.
Facebook dominated social media, the iPad was the cool device, and everybody was talking about cloud. Wikileaks featured in frequent news stories. Australia's major bricks-and-mortar retailers complained that the internet was ruining their business. And the National Broadband Network (NBN) was more a political football than a real technology project.
In this week's episode, the first of two episodes that will be looking back at 2012, we note that while these issues are mostly still with us — perhaps with the exception that Wikileaks is now more about Julian Assange's personal battles with the criminal justice system than whistle-blowing — there are signs of major changes coming.
One of the biggest is Microsoft betting its future on the radically different interface of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 at a time when, as a recent Kleiner Perkins presentation showed, the Wintel platform now accounts for just 35 percent of personal internet-connected devices, and that number is falling.
Is the age of Wintel ending? Or will the alliance between Microsoft and Nokia save both from doom?
Our panellists for this episode are:
Paul Wallbank; broadcaster, columnist, and author
Kate Carruthers; strategy consultant and founder of Social Innovation
Jeff Waugh; open-source developer, strategist, and advocate.
We also discuss the shifts in social media, including Facebook and Twitter focusing on the need for revenue over the needs of their users; how the April 2012 copyright win by internet service provider iiNet and the defeat of the SOPA and PIPA legislation in the US are really just skirmishes in the long-term battle for freedom on the internet; and how big data is one of the key issues to watch in 2013.
And I continue my own tradition of nominating an annual buzzword of hate, following on from "crowdsourcing" in 2010 and "gamification" in 2011.
The next episode of Patch Monday, to be published on Monday, December 17, 2012, looks at the year in information security.
To leave an audio comment on the program, Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.
Running time 58 minutes, 25 seconds