A ‘disruptive’ technology is one where it suddenly changes the way people do things. For example, for hundreds of years people used a slide rule to calculate, then seemingly overnight in the 1970′s the electronic calculator appeared. Everyone went Wow! and just threw away their old slide rules.
A whole industry had to change their ways or disappear. Same thing happened with electronic watches.
The leading technology research firm IDC are prediciting 3 disruptive technologies for 2011.
Going mainstream will be:
- Web connected TV
- Mobile devices
- The ‘cloud’
Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets)
It is predicted that 2011 will be the year when there will be more mobile devices sold than PCs for connecting to the Internet.It will be the end of the PC centred computing experience.And driving this change is the rise of the ‘Apps’. For the first time there will be over a million apps out there compared to only 10′s of thousands of PC applications.
There are over 2 billion people connecting to the Internet now and more than half of them do so through mobile devices.
Web connected televisions.
It is predicted that over half of TVs over 40 inches will have a network connection. And at the other end, many companies are springing up to provide content – the programs – Google TV, Apple TV, Roku and so on.
So entertainment and leisure will shift from terrestial to internet based delivery. A whole industry will begin to change the way it does things and new companies will emerge that threaten the old status quo.
The cloud
This is where companies off-load their expensive IT infrastructure and instead choose to let a cloud company host their applications and data. Over 80% of new software will be cloud based and by 2014 over a third of all software spending will be done for delivery through the cloud.
All the major IT companies are preparing the ground – IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, VMWare, Google. Think of how this will change the IT departments in large companies – no more data centres or hundreds of IT support staff needed to look after things. So the cloud is a technology that changes the way we do things.
