2005 was a good year for global economy and high technology companies. Despite natural disasters, overheated housing market and war in Iraq, US technology companies earned record profits.
Google, Wall Street’s wander child, continues to report double digits growth (down from triple digits earlier last year)
Microsoft, Intel, EBay, Amazon and other well known technology companies continue to report solid profits.
C# continues to gain ground from C++, VB.NET and Java. Here is distribution of new jobs by programming language in Los Angeles. While many small and medium size teams prefer C# to any other language, Java remains to be the language of choice for large scale projects (Ebay, Google, Amazon).
Microsoft stopped supporting its flagship operating system, Windows 2000 - the first operating system that made Windows comparably stable to Linux/Unix machines.
Microsoft shipped VS.NET 2005 - the best suite of development tools on the market. VS.NET 2005 has lots of good improvements over VS.NET 2003 that makes it a good buy to any developer.
Microsoft also shipped SQL Server 2005 that features its own CLR host, managed stored procedures and better XML support.
Microsoft lost several executives to Google and made improvements to its search engine technology. (While Google is still the best tool to search MSDN, you can often find what you need by using MSDN search).
Apple shipped estimated 30 million IPod players in 2005.
For the fist time, Microsoft freely releases recordings of PDC 2005 http://commnet.microsoftpdc.com/content/sessions.aspx
WalMart remains the world’s largest company with 100 million Americans visiting WalMarts every week. According to PBS, a typical WalMart store has close to 100,000 items in stock. To manage this variety of items, WalMart is using a supercomputer that synchronizes barcodes of sold items with new supplier orders. WalMart is said to have created a pool production eco system- products are manufactured on demand.
Starting with 2005, WalMart requires all of its suppliers to use RFID tags. RFID networks are immensely more complex than computer networks and require significantly more complex software solutions.
Outsourcing market is becoming more competitive: it is no longer possible to pay an experienced programmer in a developing country less than $1000 a month. Russian programmers that are often touted as cheap replacements for Indian programmers often make $2000 or more a month. Adding the lag and difficulties in communications, cost of travel, maintenance of foreign office, foreign taxes and extra travel makes outsourcing a questionable business tactic for any enterprise that does not have direct business interests in the foreign market it outsources to.
Food for thought: in 2004 port of Long Beach exported 3 billions dollars goods - mostly raw materials (Cotton, Hides, paper, and scrap metal) to China. It imported 36 billion dollars of mostly consumer goods from China.
In 2005, Amazon continued to expand outside of new book selling business. It now offers an equivalent of Google answers where you can get cheaply ask an online expert.
Spyware and Malware continue to spread. According to Mark Russinovich, spyware is cause of 40% of home user and 25% of corporate users support calls. Every Earthlink customer has on average 29 malware programs installed. The malware problem is estimated to cost US business 100s of billions of dollars a year. According to Symantec Security Report 8 20% of US and 30% of UK computers are bot infected. 2000+ new vulnerabilities are discovered every year.
A British software company First 4 Internet implemented a digital rights management (DRM) system for Sony/BMG by reportedly pirating the open source project Lame and outsourcing through newsgroups. Millions of Sony’s consumers who played Sony’s CDs on their computers inadvertently installed a backdoor to their operating systems. Anti-virus companies detected a malware that exploits the backdoor.
I wish all of my readers a Happy and productive New Year 2006.