The largest taxi company, Uber, owns no vehicles and lost over $5 billion in one quarter last year. The largest hotel chain, AirBnb, owns no hotels and lost hundreds of millions as well. WeWork marked the beginning; zombie tech companies will fold as investors wise up to what’s nothing more than a pump-and-dump scheme. The good news is that the immense talent that’s tied up with these zombies will be reclaimed by companies with hard assets and vetted viable business models.
Open source adoption will continue to increase. Whether your systems require AI or high speed databases, there’s almost never a reason to buy anything. The best technologies out there are free. Companies that are addicted to expensive legacy vendor products will find themselves at an extreme disadvantage to those that are able to put open source to work.
Autonomous Agile DevOps teams with a product-driven focus will continue to crush it, as will the tiny fraction of companies that manage to actually implement them. Unfortunately most companies will continue with a project-driven focus and follow their familiar command and control structure with specialized teams sitting in silos waiting for someone to tell them what to do and how to do it. They’ll likely spend big on tools and consultants that enable them to keep doing the same thing but label it Agile.
Outages and data breaches will increase in frequency and severity as many companies grapple with increasing tech debt burden and brain drain due to poor developer retention.
AI usage will accelerate, block chain will stagnate
The DOM will become barely relevant as technologies like React abstract it away. The DOM (document object model) is the backbone of the modern web and many mobile apps.
Pros in 2020: Increased returns and UX due to AI, available talent from failed zombies, amazing open source and DevOps opportunities
Cons: Investor and employment losses from failed zombies, tech debt fallout, continuing vendor lock at many companies, failure by most companies to adopt DevOps and Agile, blockchain-based companies will struggle
References:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20793793/uber-5-billion-quarter-loss-profit-lyft-traffic-2019
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/17/airbnbs-quarterly-loss-reportedly-doubled-in-q1.html