Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak offers his tech predictions for 2013 and beyond.
According to the Woz, projections for the new year were inspired by a series of conversations with Avaya exec Brett Shockley.
One of Woz’s primary predictions? Businesses will begin to use collaborative platform that “just work” for every possible need. Indeed, Woz believes companies will move away from deploying “light” collaboration apps, while shifting towards all-in-one tools that fit into existing infrastructures.
Woz also predicts that datacenter technology will be to 2013 as cloud technology was to 2012. Meaning, more focus will be put on enterprise technologies, allowing the datacenter to be used in a proactive way.
He points to a transition from hard drives to NAND flash storage technology in the datacenter, along with the dramatically improved performance that migration brings as it allows enterprise customers to use virtual machines – with an eye on decentralized cloud services.
In addition, Wozniak predicts consumer technologies that were expected to take years to develop will enter the workplace sooner than expected. Specifically, he says voice platforms will improve – from simply being able to control devices 6 inches from the users face to commanding devices from across the room. He also believes mobile devices will increasingly become the remote controls used to manipulate various devices around the office and home.
Another prediction? Businesses will continue to adapt to employees needs and the bring your own device (BYOD) trend. He also bsays employees will begin to think twice about customizing company provided devices.
Interestingly, Wozniak’s final prediction is that collaboration will transcend platforms, as it will become increasingly important for a collaboration package or app to run on multiple platforms. Indeed, devs coding collaboration applications won’t be able to only write for a single platform in 2013.
