A year of broad innovation



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December 13, 2010 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Cloud? Tablet computing? Android? Social media? Scrum? Lawsuits? It’s hard, really hard, to characterize the year that is about to conclude.

Looking back at 2010, some of the biggest news stories were regarding Java—yet it was not the Year of Java. The completion of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems brought up a lot of talk about MySQL and Java, but beyond some progress around the OpenJDK, not much happened.

Microsoft, a perennial newsmaker, advanced many of its tools and platforms, with significant upgrades offered to Visual Studio, Windows, SQL Server and SharePoint. While those delighted customers, none of those bits represented a game-changer. Perhaps Windows Phone 7 will ring the gong. Perhaps not.

We could call 2010 the Year of the Cloud. Over the past 12 months, many development organizations moved from studying cloud technology to actually using it, though in most cases that we’ve seen, cloud projects are still in the pilot phase. With fast-evolving offerings from Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, and Microsoft’s release of Windows Azure and SQL Azure, there’s no doubt that 2010 is when the cloud changed from vaporware to reality. The impact, though, is marginal.

Maybe 2010 was the Year of Scrum, or at the very least the Year of Agile. Certainly there were few conversations with industry vendors that didn’t start with the word “agile,” as seemingly every product and service was retooled (or at least remarketed) to promote agility. Of the agile methodologies discussed, Scrum received the lion’s share of the conversation. Yes, 2010 was when agile went mainstream.

Social media? It was all Facebook, all the time, except for when you were talking about Twitter. Blogs are, like, so 2009; if Google is the new Microsoft, then Facebook is the new Google. What’s the impact of all this social media hyperbole on the enterprise? Hard to assess if it matters.

Lawsuits? Some years are dominated by the courtroom, and 2010 had its share of breathless litigation. Oracle vs. SAP, Oracle vs. Google, everyone vs. Apple; patents and intellectual property are huge issues, and due to the complexity and confusion around the law, lawsuits are here to stay. None of them, however, appeared to be a show-stopper.



Related Search Term(s): agile, Apple, cloud computing, Java, Microsoft

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