Google Android and Google Chrome OS are going to be a big deal. Sell your Wind River stock (VxWorks), embedded will be owned by Google.  A big question for developers, should you target Android or Chrome for 2010 projects?  Two great things, not yet the same. Dust off those old Java books because we’re going back.

HTML 5 will make a dent, but only a dent. Flash will continue to own the rich internet, Silverlight will only get table scraps and most people will eagerly look towards HTML 5 as they continue working in Flash. Not that HTML 5 won’t eventually take over, it’s just going to be a while. Silverlight was stillborn, and it’s likely to stay that way (yes, we’re a Microsoft shop saying that).

Agile Software Development will continue to both grow and splinter. More projects will adopt things they call Agile; but less of what people call Agile will be of any value.  Agile (the community) is too focused on Scrum/xP at a time when the excitement is across the street.  The Agile community is too busy reading each other’s blogs and not paying attention to the world around.  Agile will continue its march towards irrelevance by focusing on all the wrong things. Pigs, chickens, Kanban, whatever…

Cross-vertical integration (and cross branding) will be in everything. You shouldn’t design any software without leaving a little space for cross-vertical integration. Don’t ask me why integrating a Colgate toothpaste feature into the UI of a payroll system makes sense, but that’s the direction we are heading. Okay, maybe not towards pitching products from inside the enterprise firewall just yet…but anything consumer facing needs to have hooks for cross branding; and everything needs hooks for cross-vertical integration.  Your Blu-ray player already runs Netflix, a sign of the type of things to come.  Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Sony, you name it. Expect to see lots of logos on every splash screen in the coming year(s).

64-bit. This a no-duh but we need to say it. The desktop will be 64-bit in 2010. True, Linux has been 64-bit for a while, all three installs.  Expect EVERY Windows7 installation to be 64-bit. The driver issues that discouraged this with Vista and XP are mostly gone, so the average Dell order is going to be a 64-bit OS. Developers, you need to be ready for this if you have 32-bit products fielded today.

Parallel computing.  No prediction would be complete without ubiquitous parallel computing, again. One of these days this will hapen.  Lots of reasons to be encouraged this year, especially mainlining the GPU.

Standard UI controls will finally be dead.  User experience is king and every popular application will have its own unique controls…buttons…scroll bars…and original gizmos.  Some argue that custom controls and unique user experiences will increase confusion to the user.  After all, wasn’t the homogeneity of the user experience delivered by Macintosh and Windows 3.1 considered a big advance?  However, the market speaks loudly.  Inventions like iPhone that completely redefine Ux idioms, well…they sell just fine. In the old days a custom control meant lots of work, but now it’s painless.  Going forward your customers expect a smartly designed experience, if you don’t furnish one then your competitor will.

India and China won’t win. For those who predict India and China are going to take over the software business, I’ve got news for you.  Software outsourced to those places is largely below average in every way. While they write good enough code (and only good enough), the offshore ability to use ethnography, capture innovative designs, create attractive features for users, and all the rest is lacking.  Most offshore software pros are trained as engineers or computer scientists; not as artists, designers, ethnographers, or marketers. There's a reason your favorite products say "designed in California - made in China".  Moreover, the coding piece is becoming a smaller part of product development. Already the new tech stacks have reduced same-feature development by over 50% compared to 4 years ago.  With these advances in productivity, who needs off-shore labor?  You can run a small team of people on-shore and get much better results for a negligible end-to-end cost differential.  If you really need 100 people developing in India, rethink your situation. If you want good stuff (not just stuff), then on-shore will remain the best way to get it.

Pre-visualization storyboarding and prototyping is coming of age for software design.  Pre-production visualization has long been an essential ingredient for film and theater production.  Prototyping has long been an essential ingredient of industrial design.  In the software industry we’ve known that pre-visualization and pre-production prototyping would make a valuable contribution to the product design and innovation process…it’s just nobody knew how to do it and there were no good tools. Now, we have some tools…but more importantly we have a vector.  As coding and systems engineering becomes less central to the development process, and innovation/product-design take center stage; we can expect pre-vis and prototyping to gain importance.

Augmented reality and organic experiences are the new black. A few years ago it was touch, but now touch is mainstreamed and our appetites are for something new. Don't expect Win7 multi-touch to make any difference to the world.  However, lots brilliant products have already shipped with augmented reality, and this is just the beginning. The modern user experience is a sheath overlaying the real organic world, not the chunkiness of a pure digital world. Analog is totally in.

Apple and Google will go nuclear. Apple can't get Google tech out of its products fast enough, and the conflict will escalate in 2010.  Google needs Apple not, but Apple totally depends on Google for a lot of its "coolness".  Mapping and search are only the tip of an iceberg.  As Google transforms from "math club" technology to platform vendor (Android, Chrome OS, etc..), Apple has the most at risk in terms of marketshare and demography. Google will try to "out hip" Apple in brand image, and even if Google can't 100% pull it off, Apple will be forced to go nuclear. It'll be ugly.  Both are great companies, but they are starting to be in each other's personal space.