Back to the Future Day last month got us thinking – what will the world look like in 2025? And what will technology look like? We’ve pulled together our thoughts into one listicle packed with predictions – please don’t hold us to them…
- Everything will be streamed – all TV will be streamed through the internet. Every new TV will be smart, which means applications will become a part of the furniture in our homes. Not only will you be able to watch just about anything you can imagine, you’ll also be able to play any game you want.
- The end of hardware – with streaming dominant, hardware will become less and less significant. You’ll simply need a couple of devices and you’ll be able to do just about anything you want. With graphene flooding the market, these devices will also be more efficient than anything we’re used to today – graphene batteries could make consumer tech last for weeks with a single charge.
- Everything is hardware – Hardware as we know it might be dead, but the Internet of Things will take over every single aspect of everyday life – essentially transforming everyday objects into hardware. From fridges to pavements, even the most quotidian artefacts will be connected to a large network.
- Everything will be in the cloud – our stream-only future means we’re going to be living in a world where the cloud reigns supreme. You can begin to see how everything fits together – from the Internet of Things to the decline in personal hardware, everything will become dependent on powerful and highly available distributed systems.
- Microservices will be the dominant form of cloud architecture – There’s a number of ways we could build distributed systems and harness cloud technology, but if 2015 is anything to go by, microservices are likely to become the most dominant way in which we deploy and manage applications in the cloud. This movement towards modular and independent units – or individual ‘services’ – will not simply be the agile option, but will be the obvious go-to choice for anyone managing applications in the cloud. Even in 2015, you would have to have a good reason to go back to the old, monolithic way of doing things…
- Apple and Google rule the digital world – Sure, this might not be much of a prediction given the present state of affairs, but it’s difficult to see how anyone can challenge the two global tech giants. Their dominance is likely to increase, not decline. This means every aspect of our interaction with software – as consumers or developers – will be dictated by their commercial interests in 2025. Of course, one of the more interesting subplots over the next ten years will be whether we see a resistance to this standardization. Perhaps we might even see a resurgence of a more radical and vocal Open Source culture.
- Less Specialization, Democratization of Development – Even if our experience of software is defined by huge organizations like Google and Apple, it’s also likely that development will become much simpler. Web components have already done this (just take a look at React and Ember), which means JavaScript web development might well morph into something accessible to all. True, this might mean more mediocrity across the web – but it’s not like we’re all going to be building the same Geocities sites we were making in 2002…
- Client and Server collapse on each other – this follows on from the last prediction. The reason we’re going to see less specialization in development is that the very process of development will no longer be siloed. We’ll all be building complete apps that simply connect to APIs somewhere in the cloud. Isomorphic codebases will become standard – whether this means we will still be using Node.js is another matter…
- We’ll be living in a ‘Post-Big Data’ World – The Big Data revolution is over – it’s permanently taken root in every aspect of our lives. By 2025 data will have become so ‘Big’, largely due to the Internet of Things, that we’ll have to start thinking of better ways to deal with it and, of course, understand it. If we don’t, we’re going to be submerged in oceans of dirty data.
- iOS will become sentient – iOS 30, the 2025 iteration of iOS, will become self-aware and start making decisions for humanity. I welcome this wholeheartedly, never having to decide what to eat for dinner ever again.
Special thanks to Ed Gordon, Greg Roberts, Amey Varangaonkar and Dave Barnes for their ideas and suggestions. Let us know your predictions for the future of tech – tweet us @PacktPub or add your comments below.
What’s the state of tech today? And what can we expect over the next 12 months? Check out our Skills and Salary Reports to find out.