In mid December, Justin Cormack (of Technology of Content fame) and I agreed to do a little retrospective on the worst things we’d seen during 2009. While Justin wasted no time in submitting a great post on the topic, I blinked on or around December 15th and when I opened my eyes it was January 2010 already, so in an attempt to regain Justin’s respect I offer a humble “Bottom 10 Predictions for 2010”, in no particular order:
- Content Management RFPs will continue to be liberally strewn hither and yon like confetti at a WASP wedding, with zero regard for their efficacy or otherwise.
- There will be at least one spectacular† flameout when an otherwise solid WCMS is shoehorned into a completely inappropriate use case, and then explodes in a shower of shiny sparks. This will be a direct result of WCM continuing to be misidentified as a single commoditised use case – an issue that has been beaten to death in the past, but still has no remedy in sight.
- Map / reduce will be touted as the One True Answer to Everything, while RDBMS stalwarts struggle in vain to calm the hysteria and remind everyone that it’s “merely” a handy way to crunch large data sets.
- Suffering indigestion, OpenText will divest themselves of at least one of their product portfolio. My money is on the former Tower products acquired via the Vignette purchase – they were a going concern before Vignette acquired them, and have remained relatively independent since then.
- SMB / CIFS will remain the most popular remote filesystem protocol in existence, despite being the worst (except for all the others). (with apologies to Winston Churchill)
- JCR will continue to be ignored by all of the “top shelf” CMS vendors – rapid adoption of CMIS on the server side will amplify the collective yawn that JCR evokes amongst CMS vendors.
- Momentum will continue to build on the CMIS client side – I humbly disagree with Pie’s #3 prediction for 2010 on this point, as there’s already been significant CMIS client development, and that’s before the spec has even been ratified. (I realise this is more of a “top” prediction, than a “bottom” prediction, but even a curmudgeon has his sunny moments!)
- The Cloud will be the teenage sex of 2010 – everyone says they’re doing it, but only a small subset really understands what’s involved and an even smaller minority of those are actually doing it “for real”. (note: The Cloud narrowly beat out Enterprise 2.0 for this title – I expect to see a great return match next year!).
- (speculation) Ektron will be acquired by Microsoft in order to jump start Sharepoint’s WCM capabilities.
- (super speculation!) Duke Nukem Forever will be released and will cure all those evil Wiiborgs of their sordid, physically demanding “gaming”.
And there you have it – my bottom 10 list for 2010. I hope this is enough to regain Justin’s respect, although I may have gone a little overboard with one or two items on this list. 😉
† “Spectacular” meaning it will become a cautionary tale in CMS circles.
The CMS Curmudgeon 
