Here are mine. Note: I've deliberately tried to be novel for a few of these which will mean they're less likely to be accurate.
1. A book written by a machine makes a best seller list
2. AR goes mainstream towards the end of the decade. Google dominates the visual identification of things market.
3. WebAssembly becomes pervasive on the client and the server. Side effect on the client is that it results in pervasive DRM on the web with ads that are harder to block.
4. Earth's temperature rises by 1.5C by 2030.
5. Widespread and inconsistent / incompatible regulation in multiple jurisdictions breaks the open web with many web based organisations choosing to restrict themselves to local markets rather than implement all of them.
6. PWAs become more popular than apps due to lower cost to build and higher revenues.
7. Virtual partners become popular as generated humans break through the uncanny valley.
8. Recession in 2020 / 2021, just in time for a new US government.
9. House prices will stagnate for the whole of the decade as boomers retire.
10. China will be the dominant world economy by the end of the decade (measured in GDP).
11. AI will significantly improve medical outcomes especially in early detection.
12. Renewable energy (including nuclear) will power most homes globally (50%+) due to regulations and cost efficiencies by the end of the decade (hopeful but it'll certainly trend in that direction).
13. Increasingly the wealthy will have a curated internet / app ecosystem that actively protects them from manipulation. The poor will have the opposite. This will increase populism and continue to contribute to the wealthy being confounded by it.
14. Developing software in a remote VM / container will become very popular (see Visual Studio Code Remote Extensions)
15. "serverless" i.e. building applications where the host machine is opaque will dominate software development, although this includes building serverless applications using containers.
16. Docker is no longer the most popular container runtime.
17. Regulation kills bitcoin.
18. Identity verification becomes a massive industry.
> 6. PWAs become more popular than apps due to lower cost to build and higher revenues.
I beg to differ. I think centralized online market service will become so dominant, there is no need for a small business to build and maintain any kind of app or website anymore. This is already happening, take look Amazon for retail, YouTube/Netflix for film/movie and Spotify for music as example. And the market for this is not saturated, so I'm guess there will be more and more online markets pop up in the future.
Yeah, of my predictions, I'm probably least confident about this one.
As you say it's quite likely that there'll be fewer dominant apps installed on peoples machines. Distribution is also problematic for PWAs. Even though Twitter has an excellent PWA, very few people I know have installed it. There's also less incentive for Google / Apple to encourage the installation of PWAs over apps.
On the other hand, app development is slow and costly, so there is some incentive on apps developers to use PWAs if they can get a comparable experience and distribution. Despite there being no obvious incentive to do so, Google and Apple do appear to be supporting a good number of the PWA standards.
1. A book written by a machine makes a best seller list
2. AR goes mainstream towards the end of the decade. Google dominates the visual identification of things market.
3. WebAssembly becomes pervasive on the client and the server. Side effect on the client is that it results in pervasive DRM on the web with ads that are harder to block.
4. Earth's temperature rises by 1.5C by 2030.
5. Widespread and inconsistent / incompatible regulation in multiple jurisdictions breaks the open web with many web based organisations choosing to restrict themselves to local markets rather than implement all of them.
6. PWAs become more popular than apps due to lower cost to build and higher revenues.
7. Virtual partners become popular as generated humans break through the uncanny valley.
8. Recession in 2020 / 2021, just in time for a new US government.
9. House prices will stagnate for the whole of the decade as boomers retire.
10. China will be the dominant world economy by the end of the decade (measured in GDP).
11. AI will significantly improve medical outcomes especially in early detection.
12. Renewable energy (including nuclear) will power most homes globally (50%+) due to regulations and cost efficiencies by the end of the decade (hopeful but it'll certainly trend in that direction).
13. Increasingly the wealthy will have a curated internet / app ecosystem that actively protects them from manipulation. The poor will have the opposite. This will increase populism and continue to contribute to the wealthy being confounded by it.
14. Developing software in a remote VM / container will become very popular (see Visual Studio Code Remote Extensions)
15. "serverless" i.e. building applications where the host machine is opaque will dominate software development, although this includes building serverless applications using containers.
16. Docker is no longer the most popular container runtime.
17. Regulation kills bitcoin.
18. Identity verification becomes a massive industry.