May 31, 2008

Gartner Top 10 "Technologies" For Next 4 Years

Gartner includes Semantics in it's list of the top 10 disruptive technologies for the next 4 years, as item number 10. Some commenters on the blog link are saying it should be higher (assuming an ordered list), while calling the virtualization and multicore "boring trends".

It should be no surprise that I think semantics should be taken off the list. It's not a next-4-year big thing, if any big thing at all. Multicore and virtualization is riding an exponential curve, which is the only real way to be disruptive. I believe semantics is not only difficult, but also linear. Thus, our progress in the semantic space will be far outpaced by exponential trends. I do believe we'll make progress, but my prediction is that it will be in the brute force space, aided by Moore's law over time.

Multicore isn't exciting per se, but the disruption it will drive in the software space is already visible. Concurrency is already huge if you look in the right places, but the its increasing ubiquity will start to sink in very soon.

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