my tech predictions for 2015

I put these up as a comment on Cringely.com – but they deserve sharing here, too.

In no particular order:
– AIX EoL’d
– HP-UX retired
– Itanium EoL’d (perhaps on an accelerated schedule)
– Solaris truly open-sourced / abandoned by Oracle in favor of OEL
– HP spins-off more business units
– IBM loses 25-35% of its value – and spins-off / sells more business units to make Wall Street happy
– POWER continues to slow; IBM doesn’t understand it needs to stop putting so much money into it until all the engineers have been fired
– Z/OS systems grow dramatically – the only place IBM makes *more* money
– people finally realize “cloud” isn’t a “thing” – it’s just renting crap when you need it (perhaps from yourself (private cloud)) and giving it back when you don’t
– cloud hosting providers cut prices so things like AWS instances are no longer more expensive than dedicated hardware (see eg http://benmilleare.com/how-shaving-0-001s-from-a-function-saved-us-400-dollars)
– enough of the Old Guard hits retirement age that New School tech can finally make big inroads into stodgy businesses and government (automation, cloud, *aaS, etc)
– buzzword-compliance becomes necessary even for mom-and-pop shops who don’t have computers
– Android 6 brings native, “real” 3D to cell phones
– … and iOS 9 makes it look “good”
– there’s a new MacBook Flex that offers touchscreen, a fold-flat-reverse form factor, and 12 hours of battery life; the iPad 5 is the first 5K resolution tablet, with a full day of battery life
– Max OS 10.11, aka Denali, allows users to run iOS apps via a “fat binary” model (harking back to the shift to PowerPC from 68k and then again x86 from PowerPC)
– Apple announces the first non-x86 Macs (starting with the Flex)
– Apple buys a car company in cash – Porsche or Hyundai (Hyundai would be the smart move – get more electronics manufacturing capability in-house; spin-off heavy industry wing)
– Tesla introduces a model that non-millionaires can afford – bringing snazzy competition to the Volt price point
– SpaceX sends a mission to Venus, and another to Mars
– Square opens an online bank
– Uber and Lyft grow, win cases against taxi companies – and local competition pops-up all over the country
– several major metro areas across the US all enter the “gigacity” club
– … but it’s led with smaller metro areas (like Chattanooga has already done)