2006 was ho-hum. 2007 might be better

Most of the tech world was busy working under the blanket with a flashlight this past year. Looking back, not a lot was done in the Earth-Shattering Dept for computers. Sure, gaming consoles and mobile devices did some moving and shaking. But desktop/laptop stuff was pretty quiet. I don’t count new CPU releases. That’s BORING. Not sexy, except for those that get their rocks off on the lingerie section of the J.C. Penney catalog.

Some new things will be hitting us early next year. Some new things will hit a little later (Q2 and Q3) with a few stragglers in Q4. Some items to note:

• Apples Jaguar
• MS Windows Vista
• MS Office 2007
• MS Windows Longhorn Server
• MS System Center and System Center Essentials
• MS WSUS 3.0
• VMware on Mac – check this out also
• Parallels new release (also on MySpace)
• MS’s revamped SoftGrid
• MS Exchange 2007
• New releases from Fedora and Ubuntu and possibly Suse
• FireFox 3.0 is rumored to be out in Q2, but who knows
• Updates/Upgrades to OpenOffice, mySQL
• And, as always, the rumored iPhone

I for one am looking forward to this and much more. There’s also the movement in the “hybrid” disk drive industry (merge solidstate with mechanical) and pure solidstate storage improvements. There’s more. Wal-Mart is testing RFID check-outs. Customers would be able to stroll out the door and their goods would be counted and tallied and billed to their credit or checking account. No stopping or handing things through a scanner.

Eventually, there will be no humans involved in retail shopping except for the buyers (customers). Shipping, stocking, handling, checking out, billing, will someday all be automated with conveyors, robots, etc. The writing is on the wall, if not the movie screen.

The U.S. ePassport initiative is struggling to decide on whether to go with smartcards and short-range detection, or RFID cards for 20-30 ft reading, but no encryption or authentication has been worked out.

We are gradually getting to where the technology leads us.