Trends in IT – how to predict the (digital) future?

IT is definitely one of the most dynamic areas of business and our lives. Fifty years ago almost nobody had any computer at home and only large organizations could fit them – literally, in their offices, and figuratively, in their budgets. Now not only do we have different types of computers, laptops and even dedicated gaming consoles but also our smartphones have constant access to the Internet, giving us, in turn, almost unlimited access to information anywhere, anytime.

Nevertheless, not every technical idea succeeded in the real world. And some of them did not catch on in the very beginning – some additional circumstances needed to happen. Not many people now remember that devices very similar to iPhones – which are considered as the original smartphones – were in existence for quite a few years before. They were called palmtops, equipped with Windows Mobile operating system, even with access to the Internet through Wi-Fi and an ability to install additional apps. Why did it not gain more popularity? There’s been a lot of discussion about it, but the beauty of the iPhone debut was that it’s been marketed as three different devices in one – a mobile phone, a music player and an Internet communication device. Many technical improvements were included in the original iPhone, but it wasn’t that new – you could basically do all the things with palmtops (some of them could work as phones). After the iPhone’s premiere, palmtops became a thing of the past and although Microsoft tried to catch up with the smartphone world with Windows Phone OS, they failed miserably.

This one illustrative example perfectly depicts that there is no one true recipe for knowing what the future will bring. Obviously, being able to predict it – as the great Back to the Future saga showed us – could easily give one great profit. Actually, you could earn quite a lot of money just by knowing when to click two buttons – ‘buy’ or ‘sell’ – in any trading application, on Forex/CFD or any other volatile market. Seems like an easy task, doesn’t it? Yet most people lose money when getting into such an activity, so even the art of clicking buttons might be a difficult one.

Obviously, the real profit comes from being able to predict – even with some rough degree of accuracy – how and in what direction the market and economy will expand. Of course, in the case of IT – it’d be great to foresee trends regarding certain technologies and devices, such as the advent of smartphones, tablets or – in terms of industrial applications – the Internet of Things.

The more specialized the area we are talking about, the easier it should be – at least in theory. Leaks about new iPhones – to keep the analogies straight – come up even one year before, but it is not truly predicting the future, but rather finding out about the future from people involved in the design & development process.

In practice, forecasting new trends is something in between. It is not pure guesswork, but it is not just disclosing some facts about the future. It is more about trying to influence the market – by multi-company consortia, corporations, down to groups of influence or even particular individuals. Many different entities try to present their concept, technologies & products, wishing for them to be accepted by others – just like with the premiere of the iPhone.

However, such strong and sudden moves done by single players are rather rare occurrences. Much more often, different entities observe the market, looking for interesting opportunities, and at some point, they decide to take part in a certain technology or concept. If enough people get on board, there is a much higher chance of success and getting the general audience to accept the trend.

A great example is the surge in popularity of web/internet applications in the first decade of the 21st century. While the World Wide Web had existed since the early 90s and we even had experienced the first Dot-com bubble, the first Web was simply static, unidirectional. Content was generated mostly by webmasters, often requiring quite in-depth knowledge of HTML, and regular users could only read what had been written, without being able to chime in.

The situation changed because more and more people got Internet access (in Poland the relatively ubiquitous access to the Internet became popular in the early 2000s) as well as personal computers in general. What was also crucial for the popularity of the Web was the advent of Web 2.0 – more and more web pages were able to process data from users and use it to present content. Interaction in the Internet became bidirectional – and it has been ever since. What certainly helped was also the progress in web development technology. Older Internet users certainly remember that back in the 90s and early 2000s every small action in the web page required us to reload the whole page. Do you want to just add one more piece to your e-commerce basket? You need to reload the whole page. Do you want to move between results of your search? Every page is a full reload of the page, taking a lot of precious time. The technology behind being able to just change information you want is called AJAX. I mention it here especially because its resurgence was not part of a great plan or broad initiative. People simply started noticing that by merging a few completely different mechanisms offered by web browsers, such as dynamic modification of page content (called Document Object Model), sending requests to Web servers by using XMLHttpRequest (originally developed by Microsoft!) and choosing an appropriate data format (initially XML, although JSON data format is now more popular), you can achieve much better results than with the original web development approach.

Once people had realized it was possible to connect those seemingly separate technological blocks, web development gained a huge boost in popularity and people started using web apps more and more, while native apps (run in the operating systems, such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word or most of the games) are on decline.

To sum up, it is rather difficult to predict the digital future, but a much better approach is to try to shape it yourself. But the general knowledge about the current state of the art is still very important, so it is advisable to have at least a few different sources of information to be up to date. Personally, I use Gartner’s Hype Cycle to find out a bit more about the current trends and their directions. It is also worthwhile to look for narrower sources, related to your particular type of business. In the end, let’s not underappreciate a strong “gut feeling” or a “hunch” – if a given trend/technology is something you could use yourself, it’s certainly a good heuristic, a good measure of something you might invest your time into.