New board in action, as requested:
Thanks Santa, we had a great day out today in Gryon/Villars. Where it was quite spectacular:
I hope you are having a good break if you are getting one.
As I probably won’t be posting tomorrow:
Happy New Year
cheers
Simon
I just re-read my predictions for 2010 and I note I hardly went out on a limb, with most of them being either blindingly obvious or un-falsifiable. Here they were.
The big (IT) 2010 story for me is how Oracle and Microsoft fell in love. I totally didn’t see that coming at all. By destroying first the OpenOffice dev community, and secondly the Java community Oracle has hamstrung two of the few viable competitors Microsoft had. I’m not clear what Oracle get in return, MS maybe promised to keep Steve Ballmer in charge.
I’ll just skim over the predictions I made:
Microsoft/Office/Excel
All the new stuff got released as expected, Office 2010 seems ok, they fixed some of the most obvious badness of 2007. VS2010 is the slowest, most bloated piece of pap I have ever used. I have 2008 and 2010 on my works machine and use 2008 wherever possible because you need a Cray super computer just to load VS2010 in under 3 minutes, never mind compile something.
I don’t think VBA went into freefall, it is still the user automation tool of choice (its a choice limited to one after all). But most financial services jobs are now looking for some C# in addition. Many seem to be trying VSTO and rejecting it though, and a lot of people I have spoken to recently are going the ExcelDNA route instead.
Sharepoint does seem to be hotting up, spreadsheets are ever more the scourge, Microsoft is becoming less relevant. There were quite a few spreadsheet risk/quality projects going on in 2010, they will be sharepoint clean ups in 2015.
Apple
Apple had a brilliant 2010 and that looks set to continue. The ipad still has no viable competition and they are flying off the shelves. Apple are reliving Microsoft from the 90’s before MS forgot that apps sell platforms. I can’t imagine Apple being too scared by the arrival of the Windows phone. I won’t get an iPad, but I could be tempted by the 11″ Air as a decent netbook to run Linux. Although rumours of an Ubuntu tablet in 2011 piqued my interest the other day.
Hardware
Consumers are certainly living their lives more and more away from a pc on their ipads and iphones, not so sure about the corps? Blackberry still doing well.
Software/General/Other
I really hadn’t expected that you would have to be sexually abused in order to get on a plane, but I did forsee an increase in regulation. Luckily (?) with the change (?) in government in the UK the rate and intrusiveness of regulation seems to have slowed down, a little. Glad I’m not a banker though.
OLAP/BI seemed to stand still in 2010 as a lot of the column inches went on security and cloud fluff. Whilst we can argue about whether user requests could get a lower priority, I don’t think anyone would say they got higher in 2010.
Android seems to have picked up some credibility, although the Motorola Droid I have is the worst electrical device I ever owned.
Santa brought one of the kids a netbook for xmas but he gave up trying to find a Linux one and just got a windas 7 one. WTF happened to Linux on Netbooks?? They are as rare as rocking horse poop suddenly. Its pretty cool here though as all the kids want Ubuntu because it has the best games, so I’ll be replacing Microsofts’ finest with NBR 10.10 (no silly name this time?), obviously without caring about Ubuntu One.
So overall, many things seem to have turned out roughly as expected, a few haven’t (yet), some might never.
I’ll do my predictions for 2011 within the next few days, although from a spreadsheet point of view its hardly exciting.
What were your standout moments/trends/events from 2010?
cheers
Simon
I hope you all had a great Christmas and all the best for the new year.
I intend to pull my finger out and blog a bit more frequently in 2011, the last few months have been a bit poor.
Santa brought me a new snowboard which I will try out properly in the next couple of days, I hope you got what you asked for too.
cheers
Simon
Smurf on Spreadsheets 
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