What's Next

I want to look at the state of the industry for a minute. Looking forward, there are a few big changes that I can point to:

Hard drives will be replaced with flash-based storage.
This one is starting to become common knowledge for anyone closely following the industry. The cost of memory keeps going down and the storage size keeps going up. This transition will have great speed benefits across the board for computers and it really opens the doors for hardware speeds. Some people think the start of transition is still far away, but I believe it is right around the corner in the next couple of years for laptops. (It's already happened with the most popular iPods, for instance.)

Resolution independence will improve how we see content.
There have been a lot of murmurs about this recently. Despite all the discussion, I don't think a lot of people understand what resolution independence means. In a sentence: it gives people the ability to easily control how big everything is on the screen. If you have a big screen and don't need the screen real estate, you can adjust everything larger without causing pixilation due to resolution emulation. This has many positive implications, but moving to it requires a good amount of developer effort and it's not going to happen overnight. It sounds like Leopard will ship with support built-in to encourage developers to get started thinking about scaling factors... but it probably won't be until Mac OS X 10.6 (after Leopard) when it becomes a full-fledged feature for consumers to enjoy.

The web is in its infancy and it will get unbelievably cooler.
Tim Berners-Lee outlined the World Wide Web in 1990, and didn't start taking off until a handful of years later. For all intents and purposes, the web is maybe 12 years old or so. That means we're at a point where lots of people are going "Oh yeah, the web" and talk about it like it's reached its full potential and it's "finished." We've become accustomed to it in our daily lives and so easily forget it did not exist at all just a few years ago. Here's a wake-up call: think about cars when they were 12 years old... suddenly you realize we're just barely getting started. There is so, so, so much more that can and will be done with the web.

I think these are some of the most important changes up ahead. There are of course many other trends we're moving toward in the future as well and I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments.

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