Looking Back - How Did We Do With Our Prognostications?

As we start into our last week of the year, it is a good time for looking back. Therefore, we think it is worthwhile to review what we proposed would be the big technical topics of 2019. The summary of that article is that we suggested five hot topics.

Azure/Office 365
Amazon AWS
Single-Sign-On/Security
Virtual Machines/Containers
Blockchain Solutions

Our Hits in Looking Back

The good news is that each of our five recommendations worked out. Thus, if you learned more and gained experience in these areas during 2019, then you did well. All five of the items we listed have continued to grow and mature. Better yet, there are plenty of jobs related to these technologies so you are more marketable.

The Technologies That We Missed

In scanning the landscape of articles about 2019, we failed to mention several technologies that were hot. Many of these have moved faster than we thought. However, the speed that these technologies were adopted seems to have surprised many in the industry. Here are the misses we discussed.

Internet Of Things
Artificial Intelligence
5G Networks
Serverless
Biometrics
Augmented Reality
Drones

Our Mea Culpa

There are some important things to note about these technologies. For example, IoT has moved along at a good pace in the past few years. However, we saw a big market appear for these devices in the areas of home security and automation (Nest, Ring, etc.). The prices have been reduced by Amazon and Google to flood the market. That push has been successful for them.

Biometrics, Drones, and Augmented Reality are technologies that have been floated to some extent in the past. Thus, we were not sure this would be the time they would become mainstream. Alas, we were wrong. Nevertheless, the cost of these devices has come down to a point where we see them everywhere. Biometrics have appeared on laptops, phones, and even watches. Drones are everywhere it seems as video quality has improved. Finally, Augmented Reality is getting to a point where the computations required can be done in a useful amount of time.

That is our looking back discussion. Therefore, we can start to close the book on 2019 and look to the year and decade ahead.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/top-10-emerging-technologies-of-2019/