Trends and Predictions for 2006 (IT-Director)

Trends and Predictions for 2006 (IT-Director)

I am thinking of a sarcastic comment about the result of averaging a 1st and 3rd world country, but that would be offensive, so I will keep it to myself ;-) Besides, after everyone figures out that all the real money in the world has been leveraged so many times over that it no longer exists we will all live in 3rd world countries... Which reminds me, I need to stock up on toilet paper and canned goods...

Regarding interfaces, I keep thinking of the comment often made that if you build something that even an idiot can use, only idiots will use it...

Clearly that is not entirely true... ipods sell very well (though to be honest, I find my ipaq running (yegads!) winCE to be a perfectly adequate MP3 player... Have not felt the need to blow a weekend converting that to linux and then figuring out if I can get xmms to work...)

But, as everyone races to make KDE/Gnome compete with Windows, I find myself liking/using Xfce and the like even more... (not specifically, just simple, yet flexible WMs that just "do what I want")

I am less concerned about the all the various bells and whistles than:

a. can I do what I want efficiently?
b. does it chew up memory I could be putting to use in my daily memory/cpi intensive work?
c. does it crash?
d. can I tweak easy stuff like decorations (I really hate title bars greater than about 15 pixels that use up my expensive LCD pixels for no good reason, but I cannot live without them entirely...)
e. MOST IMPORTANTLY, is the undustry doing things that will make it impossible for me to have this level of control?

So, "e" puts it all into persepective for me... I am not sure I would like what ultimately has to exist to get into every last home, and school backpack... I will likely always want something more flexible, powerful, capable, secure etc...

I just want to make sure I can do that without spinning my own ASICs and even then without being put in jail for building said ASICs as they fail to conform with the Mr. Vader's latest DRM legislation...