Another year has passed, and it is time to take a look back.
As expected Microsoft and others have been pushing the cloud for all it's worth. The adoption has been a bit slower than the fluffy promise-makers would like. To date there has not been a major hacking incident with a major supplier, which is a good thing, but it is still possible and has happened to at least one smaller provider, putting them out of business. Mobile devices have become more prevalent and in my latest job I have been hearing the support personnel talking people through connectivity with their tablets and mobiles. With people moving away from the concept of fixed lines and devices this is not a surprise.
Overall the world's connectivity improved in many countries this year. A notable exception was Australia where their monopolistic NBN system's old technology fibre roll out continues to be tardy, provides slow and unreliable service, and looks like it may collapse into a digital heap in the near future. Readers in Thailand should be thankful that your service is faster and less expensive. Mobile connectivity is also starting to overtake the fixed line versions and in some places is providing faster access to the internet. In one interesting experiment this year the staff at UK's Andrews & Arnold used a 2m piece of wet string to conduct a 3.5Mbps ADSL signal. The test was based on the joke that "ADSL signals could operate over wet string".
Also as predicted, the release cycles for major products has sped up. Microsoft has already released SQLServer 2017 hot in the heels of 2016 and I don't see this process slowing down. If you think about how this happens as a continual cycle in Azure, in their cloud, again this makes sense. The DevOps concept did not evolve as fast as I'd expected but the trend is certainly there. The malware attacks continued and captured more millions of records of information. Some due to hacking and others due to human failures. I hope that readers had their anti-malware software up to date throughout 2017.
Monitors didn't grow much in size this year and for the most part there was little movement in this space indicating that the 28-30-inch monitor is about as big as it gets for the desktop user. PC sales did drop off this year and some organisations moved to the all-in-one desktop unit. Nothing much changed with camera technology with only a few incremental improvements in lenses and other areas. As expected, the dual camera started popping up more often in smartphones, in a variety of configurations.
My prediction of a Chinese phone maker passing either Apple or Samsung also came to pass with Huawei taking second spot. I was wrong about screen sizes however, some did indeed pass 6 inches but usually by employing a curved screen to keep the in-hand size to a minimum. Apple didn't do very well this year with at best playing catch-up instead of setting any new standards for the others. We did see some phones come with small optical zoom but most of the improvements came in processing. Instead of dropping, high-end prices increased, including for the Chinese phone makers. Apple of course led the pack with a crazy price for their Apple X model. Samsung did recover from the Note 7 debacle but the Note 8 is a very nice unit, with a 2x optical zoom and a screen a fraction larger than the S8 plus, which I am still enjoying.
Regular hard drives are common in 6, 8, 10 and 12TB models with larger sizes available. MicroSD only made it to 400GB instead of the predicted 1TB. Thumb drives didn't make it past 1TB but that is still a lot of storage in smaller and smaller packaging. Battery technology didn't improve much this year so that one is still on the wish list. Li-Ion batteries face the risk of fire and explosion, so it will be interesting to see how long it takes for one to occur in the new world's largest battery farm in South Australia installed by Elon Musk. On that subject, his electric cars have not been doing so well in the US.
Amazon finally released a waterproof Kindle, the latest Oasis, and increased the screen size to 7 inches. It is still overpriced for what you get, especially since you must pay extra for text to speech, something supported in their earliest models.
The interesting development this year was the rapid rise of Bitcoin. The current value is trading very high indeed and some are predicting a crash soon. I'm not so sure about that, but it has evolved into a recognised currency by those using it and that is the whole point of a currency, many of which are backed by very shaky foundations. I wish I had mined a few back when it was a lot easier.
To all readers, enjoy your Christmas and New Year season while staying safe.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.
