Predictions in Tech: Looking Forward from 2022

Within a Year

In less than a year from now, my predictions is that the energy and hardware costs for servers and data centers are going to rise. As such, the costs of cloud services (such as AWS) will also rise. With these rising costs, there will be two things that happen: more layoffs and rising costs for online services. Some companies will choose one route over the other, some will do both, and a few will be able to get away without any significant change. Some companies will start looking to move off of the cloud, but that will take time and I predict most companies will not jump off of cloud services next year. Instead, they'll do damage control with cost-cutting and/or revenue spiking.

I'm also going to predict that prepaid phone plans will become more commonplace within the next year as they are cheaper, and in an age of rampant inflation that cost-cutting will be helpful for many families. Any sort of SMS verification system that relies on post-paid plans will fall apart and will need to adjust to stay relevant. I'm also expecting a lot of phone number changes, and with those changes I'm expecting that some people will be very upset when they realize how much terrible software has been written which assumes that phone numbers don't change for a person. Locked-out accounts will be commonplace for services with SMS-based two-factor authentication. It may not be so commonplace as to be news-breaking, but there will be an increase in account lockouts.

Manufacturing woes from China will start encouraging bigger companies to start investing heavier in alternative factory locations. India would be the next prime target for cheap labor and the U.S. would be good for stability in case of major, global occurrences (such as an escalation in a global conflict).

We will start seeing a resurgence in movie theaters and film releases. Box-office numbers will start to return to normal and there will be more hype around releasing in theaters rather than just on a streaming platform. While some companies with large platforms (like Disney) will still try the "dual release" or "online only" release, other studios with smaller platforms will really start taking to the theaters.

2-3 Years

This far out becomes a bit harder to predict since there's a lot of variables, so more of my predictions will have "conditions" in them.

If supply chain and energy issues continue steadily through this time, then data center prices will really start rising. This will lead to companies looking at how to cut down in hardware costs, since cutting more staff wouldn't be sustainable after a while. The whole "microservice" movement will be slowing if not halting altogether.

The increased in server costs and limitations in further cutting personnel will disproportionately hit companies that have heavily invested in "microservice" architecture. Microservice architectures usually result in much higher developmental and server costs than either monolithic or the in-between of larger service based architectures. These microservice companies will start investigation how to amalgamate microservices into larger services. Many who are "on the cloud" will also start investigating shifting over to non-cloud solutions (or at least, move to data centers which don't have the "dynamic scaling" premiums). New businesses that specialize in "cutting cloud costs", "making microservices cheaper", and "moving off the cloud" will start cropping up.

Services will also increase monetization efforts to help offset rising costs. Video streaming services (YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, etc.) will be struggling during this time period. Some streaming platforms will shut down, most likely platforms from smaller studios who will then seek to license their videos onto other platforms for money. By around this time, Netflix (if it's still around and is scoring good license deals) may start calming down on its video game ambitions, though we will probably start seeing some announcements from their studios created in 2022.

There will also start being a small movement to go away from "online all the time" and "pay a subscription each month" and an increased focus on "one-time pay products" or "pay to own". This movement will be small, but if service costs continue to rise then the movement will start growing.

Larger video game companies will also be a bit more conservative in game genres and game ideas. This may result in more indie studios with more outlandish ideas. However, it will also result in increased game cost, either through aggressive monetization or finally breaking the $60 price barrier.

During this time period is where one of the current major social media platforms will probably fall (Meta, Twitter, TikTok, etc). The fall won't be "the company no longer exists", but rather the "company is a shell of itself". Currently, there is a lot of turmoil across the social media space, and it doesn't look like the turmoil will be short-lived. TikTok is under intense pressure from many governments which are wanting to ban it. Meta is sinking billions into the metaverse with no end in sight, and the technology is too far away for it to become mainstream (I'm guessing 8-10 years before AR/VR is mainstream). Twitter is saddled with a debt so large the non-profitable company has to pay $1 billion dollars in interest annually. All of these factors, if not addressed quickly, can cause massive trouble for a major social media platform. I am predicting that some social media platforms will figure out their issues, so not all of them will fall. But at least one is going to struggle and will become a shell of itself as it undergoes massive restructuring.

If gig workers are ruled to be full employees of a company (such as Uber or Lyft), by now we would be seeing greater financial strain on the gig-based companies with a few of them shutting their doors. Uber, Lyft, Doordash, etc. aren't currently profitable, and if they have to provide benefits and fair pay to drivers, then they will become very unprofitable. Some of them will run out of cash and will have to fold. Their competitors won't be faring much better. Prices for these services will start climbing, and as they climb they will become less popular.

4-6 Years

Now we are really starting to get into theoretical territory.

By this time, there will be more system-level programming languages that are competitors to both Rust and C/C++. While there are some languages today (like Zig), they aren't supported well enough or have a large enough community to be a true competitor. However, by this point some of those languages will be big enough to start gaining some traction. The fact that they're easier than Rust, less error-prone than C/C++, and closer to how many devs already think will help them grow faster than Rust is growing.

At the same time, Rust will be starting to get some well-developed libraries. At this point, the Rust ecosystem will be "mature" enough for companies to start investigating it. However, it is also at this point that it will begin to struggle a lot more in growth and acceptance with the "steep learning curve" issues. Companies don't want to pay lots of money to retrain developers, so their adoption will be slow, if it happens at all. Also, by the 4-5 year marks, enough additional complexity will be added to Rust that the learning curve issue will be magnified. While Rust won't be going away, it won't be very popular either.

If server costs are still rising, even if infrequently, then we will see almost no growth in "microservices" and an increasing movement into "efficient development." Efficient development will involve both moving away from microservices and prioritizing leaner code. Leaner code will mostly focus on libraries and frameworks. There will be some movements that are about optimizing code for existing languages, and smaller movements for using systems languages for traditionally non-systems tasks. There will also be movements for "off the cloud" and "you don't need the cloud."

Some companies will be experimenting with rewrites of their code into systems languages. Many of the talks given by these companies would focus on Rust alternatives, such as Zig, Jai, Carbon, or C++2. C++ would also start appearing in web conferences again, but exclusively in its modern form. Rust would still be around and still be talked about, but by this point it won't be the hot new thing on the block.

If services are still raising prices, then "one-time pay" products would be booming. Users would start preferring to pay to own a copy of a movie or software product instead of paying to "borrow" or "use". There will be a shift as well away from "always online" as simply bundling online services for one-time pay products wouldn't be cost-effective. Monthly fees would just be too much, and the "Software as a Service" business model would get a bad reputation. Some more services, including paid ones, will start dying out. Of course, after the economy stabilizes for a few years, SaaS would come back, but just with a different name. SaaS isn't going to truly die, just have dips in popularity, just like "pay to own" hasn't died (for proof, go look at Walmart's $5 DVD/Blu-Ray bins).

By this time, if a multi-year recession had taken place, then there would be a lot of internet users with older, slower, machines. A large gap in technological power would emerge, with the elite few having newer, faster machines and everyone else having much older hardware. This means that software which appeals to wide audiences would have to support slow hardware. Client rendered applications and Single-Page Applications would be on the way out, and WASM would have to turn to somewhere off the web to really get going.

On the flip side, if there wasn't a prolonged economic crash, then WASM would just be starting to shine as the future of client-rendered content. By this point, enough programming languages and frameworks would be developed and refined to give WASM a fair shake. Microsoft's Blazor framework (or future successor) would be leading the charge, at least initially. Google would have their own WASM framework to catch up, and they may try to merge it with Android application development. If WASM frameworks being to be used for native applications, Apple would be working on their own framework to keep devs using Macs and XCode for iOS development, though they may not have it released by now.

Additionally, if SaaS prices stabilized by now, then SaaS would be staying around for a long time. Probably at least another decade. Stabilization could happen by: leaving the cloud, removing microservice architectures from products, using more efficient languages, and/or a restoration in supply chain costs and energy prices. Also, if SaaS and server prices stabilized, then hybrid and remote work would start growing more quickly. There would also be a larger exodus of highly-paid engineers leaving California to go live somewhere cheaper.

Also, by now most new manufacturing by larger companies would be happening outside of China. India would be charging into a major industrialization and modernization era, spearheaded by newer manufacturing plants. China would be forced to adapt its economic strategy. China would still be making products for many smaller companies, and any existing product lines that were setup in China would remain through the lifetime of the products being made.

6+ Years

If cloud or server costs are still rising, then most companies will be fleeing the cloud quickly if they have not already fled. Also, microservices would pretty much be dead and efficient runtime would be lauded over quick development time. However, after such a long time, most companies would be struggling to make and keep an online presence. If server costs were still rising, there would be a rise in more traditional communications, such as calling, texting, talking in person, etc. Hybrid or remote work would really start dwindling after 5 years of increasing server costs.

That said, if server costs had stabilized before this point, then there would also be startups dedicated to bringing remote work and remote training to non-tech and non-office jobs, such as traditional trade jobs, such as carpentry, plumbing, and electrical. These start-ups will be trying to address the shortage in trade jobs by increasing the effective working area of those working in the trades. How successful these companies will be is another matter.

Regardless of economics, there are a few predictions for the 6+ year mark.

"Made in India" not "Made in China" will become the new normal for many items. Some higher quality or national security related items will be made in the Americas, either the U.S. or Mexico. China will still have some manufacturing, but it will be transitioning to a post-manufacturing economy.

Newer programming languages that combine both efficiency and ease of development would emerge by this time. Most of these languages would have started development during inflation and economic difficulties, so they would be based around the idea of surviving tough economics. Many would be compiled languages that either used efficient reference counting memory management, ownership, manual memory, or some new technique. Most of these new languages would prioritize static linking and easy deployments, and some will focus on cross-compilation as well. They would just be coming onto the scene at around 6 years, so it would take a while before there was significant adoption. However, many of their ideas would also start being incorporated into existing systems level languages to make those languages easier to use. The new languages would offer "ease of development", "increased developer productivity", and "low to no cost for running" as the main selling points. The pitch would be to save on both the human labor/skill costs and the hardware costs for products. The main factor to how many of these languages start emerging would be how long the economic downturn lasted.

Some language developers and committees would also start thinking about how to train developers on their language. There will be increased experimentation on how to make learning programming languages quicker and enjoyable for devs. Some languages will start splitting developers into "application builders" and "library builders", with each one getting content tailored to them. Some languages will start focusing on interactive tutorials instead of long-form content pages. Others will start focusing on some more involved tutorial projects that are based on "real-world" projects. A few will experiment with "language translations" where it shows examples from languages devs are familiar with, and then the equivalent (generally shorter) code in the new language. Some will come up with an idea not on this list.

More unikernel and microkernel projects would also be emerging by now. These projects would again be retargeted to lowering server costs. Some of them may also be trying to make the development process easier, but that is not the primary focus. Consequently, they will remain more niche, though there will be slightly more adoption than there is now.

It would be in this time period that VR and AR technologies would start to get refined enough to grow in user base. However, premature marketing will have soured the public's appetite for a while. At around the 8-10 year mark is when we'll see it going mainstream, once enough time has passed for AR/VR innovations to come together as a "new" product. To go along with this, a new, very refined, device will most likely be what launches VR and AR into mainstream.

Also, by now technology courses in schools will be part of the curriculum. Robotics, programming, etc. will be taught at least in the high school level in the majority of school districts.

Conclusion

No one can see the future, so these are all predictions. I may be wrong on everything, I may not be. It'll be interesting to see what I got right, and what I got wrong. It'll also be interesting to see if there are things I correctly predicted but missed on the timings (i.e. got the "what" but not the "when").