I’m feeling bold after writing my review of the previous decade so I’ll make some predictions about what’s going to happen in the coming decade.

The Last OS
Sometime around the middle of the decade Microsoft will release a new operating system. And that will be their last. I’m not saying that Microsoft will go out of business. Just that it won’t be profitable for them to create another operating system. Neal Stephenson writes in his book In The Beginning Was The Command Line:

…the very nature of operating systems is such that it is senseless for them to be developed and owned by a specific company. It’s a thankless job to begin with. Applications create possibilities for millions of credulous users, whereas OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy coders, and so OS-makers will forever be on the shit-list of anyone who counts for anything in the high-tech world. Applications get used by people whose big problem is understanding all of their features, whereas OSes get hacked by coders who are annoyed by their limitations.

More than likely Microsoft will evolve. They may not be the 800 pound gorilla they are today but they’ll probably be a major player in software development.

The next AOL
Ten years ago AOL was on top of the world. But it was clear to see that trouble lay ahead. Broadband Internet access was destined to grow and AOL was going to have a very difficult time tapping into that market. AOL is still around. But it’s a small time player.

So who’s going to go the way of AOL in the next ten years? My money is on every mobile phone service provider in the world: AT&T, Verizon, T-mobile, etc. There will certainly be mobile phones. You just won’t need a service provider for it. You can almost get away with that right now if you’re phone is WiFi enabled and you’re running something like Skype. You probably can’t use that combination while driving down the interstate between cities but it’s just a matter of time. WiMax will be rolling out. At first we’ll pay for it – like we used to do with WiFi – but eventually it will be free and ubiquitous. The hardware for providing mobile access is going to drop so low that many people will have the equivalent of a cellphone tower in their living room. There are technical hurdles to overcome but nothing that is a deal breaker.

Platform Ubiquity
Of course I’m biased to the Flash Platform since that’s what I do. But I don’t see anything from preventing AIR from becoming the platform of choice when developing most applications. The one possible roadblock would come if for some reason Google decided not to play nice with AIR. But I don’t see that happening. Google doesn’t make developer tools and so I don’t see any reason for them to do anything other than embrace AIR.

I wrote earlier about the AIRos. I don’t actually see AIR ever replacing any OS. Instead it will become the dominant presentation layer across devices.

The gulf will widen
One social issue that I see developing is between those who embrace the rapid changes in technology and those who don’t. It exists right now. Go to Walmart and do a poll about who uses Twitter or Facebook on a daily basis. Now do the same thing at Whole Foods. Do you think there will be a difference? Sure but it hardly matters. But it’s going to start to matter more and more. People who embrace change and technology are going to see their productivity and creativity rise. They will have access to information and to people that will give them advantages that will make a real difference in how they work and live.

What else? I don’t know. You tell me. I think we’re even going to have a general session on this topic at 360Flex in San Jose this March.

What a difference a decade makes. In the year 2000 AOL was worth about $240 billion. It’s unlikely that you had heard the term WiFi or of a company named Google. A T1 line was considered blazing fast. More than 91% of home Internet connections were done at 56kbs or slower. A top line PC ran at about 600MHz and didn’t have the processing power of today’s smartphone. Apple was a joke. And mobile phones were used to make phone calls and that’s about it. If you watched video on the Internet it was probably through the RealPlayer. And you certainly didn’t watch it in HD because a big monitor was about 1024 x 768 – and it wasn’t an LCD.

There was no Facebook, no MySpace, no Twitter, and no Skype. Hell, there were very few places where you could even comment on someone else’s website. And everything was a website because very few people had heard the term blog before.

Evolution of the Flash Platform
There was no Flash Platform yet. Advanced Actionscript involved making dynamic MovieClips. ( Remember createEmptyMovieClip(). That used to be a big deal. )

We were still a few years away from Macromedia MAX 2003. Which as far as I can tell was the first MAX event. ( Update: there was DevCon and UCON which evolved into MAX. ) I even did a double-take while looking at the MAX 2003 page where it said:

On the web, we’re seeing a shift from inaction to interaction. To fill this need, Macromedia offers the Studio MX 2004 and Flex products to help designers and developers create more interactive web experiences.

Flex is that old? Wow! How far they have come.

The Flash Community
In 2000 the Flash community didn’t extend much beyond the walls of Macromedia. How could it. There were practically no books on the subject and I don’t know of any blogs. Not that it would matter because how would you ever find them? There was no RSS and searching the web was a mess.

Get a job
Very few people had fulltime jobs doing work with Flash. And if you did you were a designer. Even then most of the work involved the dreaded skip intro. Could anyone have guessed what lay ahead?

My guess
If you’d like to see what I do think lies ahead for us in the next decade then read the follow up to this post Predictions for the next decade.

TweepJob.com is a free service that uses #hashtags to help track messages on Twitter. If you are looking for a job or freelance gig then just send a twit about what you’re looking for and add the #tweepseek hashtag in there somewhere. Conversely if you are an employer looking to fill a position then use #tweephunt.  TweepJob tracks tweets based on these #hashtags to let you know what others are looking for. And be sure to follow TweepJob so that you’ll get the updates.

You can read the press release here.

If you’re new to Twitter let me suggest that the only people you want to follow right at the start are people that you know. People that you can email and say, “I have a Twitter account so follow me.” Because if you follow someone that you don’t know, like me for instance, I’ll get an email that says, “So-in-so is following you …”

I’ll go to your Twitter homepage and find, a twit or two, and a bunch of people that you’re following. But that doesn’t help me decide if I want to follow you. My rule for following someone at twitter is pretty simple: if you have any twits that have to do with coding, especially about Flex/Flash/AIR, then I’ll follow you. Secondarily, if you have lots of geeky twits then it’s likely that I’ll follow you. But I need a body of twits to determine if you’re going to be twittering anything I’m interested in.

So spend a week, or more, just writing twits. Maybe no one will see them, yet. But when you start following people, then we’ll read them.

Oh, one more thing, if most of your twits start with an @ sign then I probably wont follow you and I’m sure most people wouldn’t. I do my own share of twitter-replys but that’s not all I twitter. No one wants to hear one side of a conversation.

NOTE: If you are having trouble viewing the videos at NFL.com then try this page where many users have offered solutions that they have discovered.

For years the NFL.com site has been using RealMedia for their video streaming. They finally updated their site and are now using Flash video. Go Team!!!

Beyond that they have greatly increased the amount of video they are delivering. Each game will have video highlights and they have lots of interviews and analysis delivered with Flash video. Their video player has maximum dimensions of 640 x 360 and has a full screen mode in IE but not Firefox.

I checked the source code of the homepage and they are also using the SWFobject to embed the HTML code dynamically to get around the Internet Explorer’s Eolas/ActiveX activation crud.

Preseason practice

On the downside I had lots of problems browsing to some of the videos and getting them to play correctly on a Win XP machine with IE7 and Firefox 2.0. Of course the commercials play just fine but the content often fails to queue up.

The video content navigation is handled in HTML so the problem is likely the Javascript communication between the HTML container page and the Actionscript. It’s amazing how often that gets messed up but as everyone knows Javascript can be more than a little finicky. Hopefully they’ll get that sussed out before the regular season is underway.

Close, but not perfect

They could have used video.Maru for their video player but it doesn’t look like they did. Oh well, I can dream. :-)

Fantastic

As a fan I couldn’t be happier. I’ll be on the NFL.com site on a daily basis during the football season. I don’t have cable TV because there isn’t much to watch besides football and the History/Discovery channel. The way things are going it won’t be much longer before I’ll be able to watch anything I want via the Internet.

Addendum: one day later

I’m working with one of the dev’s at NFL.com to help trouble-shoot the problems I mentioned above. Here on my system at home everything works flawlessly. At my friend’s house on the same setup I had all sorts of problems. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?