Predictions for 2021

It's January, the start of anew year. Let's have some predictions!

We can start with easy predictions:

Remote work: Telework and online meetings will continue to be popular. Covid-19 is still with us; work-from-home will remain a necessity for many people.

There will be some push-back against remote work; some from managers and some from employees. In my view, discomfort with remote work is a symptom that the right performance measurements are not in place.

If easy, simple, and clear performance measurements are available, then it is easy to see that an employee is performing -- or not performing -- whether they work in the office, at home, or at a different location. But in our imperfect world, there are many jobs that do not have easy, simple, and clear performance measurements.

Companies have an opportunity to review performance measurements and improve them to match telework, Will they? A minority, I think, will.

ARM processors: The new processors from Apple will be hailed as a significant advance in performance, and Microsoft will be pressured to increase support for ARM processors. Most of the interest in ARM processors is driven by raw performance.

Improving the performance of desktop computers may be a mistake -- except for Apple. Computing -- except for Apple -- long ago moved from the desktop to web servers, and is not moving to cloud servers. The desktop is not the center of computing; it is more akin to a terminal in a timeshare system. Improving the desktop performance does not help the central processor.

Apple is an exception. It continues to use the model of desktop applications, where processing occurs on the local PC (or the tablet, or the watch). For Apple, improving the processing capabilities of the local PC makes sense.

Programming languages: The general trends of language popularity will continue; that is, most languages will decline in popularity. Expect declines in especially Perl and Java. Perl because Python is gaining at the former's expense, and Java because Oracle is doing little to help the development communities. (Both commercial and open source communities.)

I expect little in the way of improvements to Objective-C compilers and libraries. Apple will encourage people to move to Swift, and not developing Objective-C is one part of that strategy.

I expect to see a large number of new programming languages, made by individuals and research groups, and perhaps even companies, but none of them will become popular. We have our hands full with the current set of languages; new languages will be curiosities. An exception might be a programming language that is designed for cloud computing. Such a language would be designed for smaller programs, most likely not object-oriented, easy to learn, and capable of receiving and sending web requests.

Corporate migrations: We've already seen companies leave California for Texas. Will other companies follow? I tend to think that these migrations were made possible by the work-from-home forced upon us by Covid-19. Regardless, companies have decided that they can leave Silicon Valley.

Companies may leave the condensed area of Silicon Valley to form a new condensed area somewhere else -- or they may disperse across the country. (And some may even leave the United States.) The result will be a shift in employment, as some companies will ask employees to follow to new headquarters and others will let employees work from any location. Some companies may move only the executives, others may ask the entire roster of employees to move, and some may move select departments and keep others in their current locations.

I expect that there will be no new "Silicon Valley", no one place that attracts tech companies (much less all of the companies). Individual companies will move to locations that make sense for each company. That could be Austin, TX; Miami, FL; Phoenix, AZ; or any of a number of smaller cities.

Legislation will have major effects: An obvious area of legislation will be the DMCA (for copyright issues) and CDA section 230 (which shields platforms from liability of content posted by users). Other issues will be digital taxes (or more precisely, taxes on the providers of digital services), anti-trust, and privacy concerns. Any of those could become a hot issue in 2021.

Politics will remain significant: Already we have seen Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon take action against users who violate their terms of service. These actions have seen reactions and pushback from other users, loyal to the original offenders. The social and political environment will make it difficult for companies to remain neutral. Companies which move their offices will be judged on the move, both in the origin (where they move from) and the destination (where they move to).

Summary: Changes for 2021 will be driven more by non-tech issues than tech issues. New versions of Java or C# programming languages will have little effect on the market. New cloud services and new versions of operating systems will have little effect. Politics, legislation, and possibly high-profile lawsuits will drive the changes.