The bets ...

Every now and then I make bets about the future, a gamble on the actions of individual players. I thought I'd write down some of the outstanding bets I have, obviously leaving out the counterparty & how much it is for (which is normally a cup of tea or a pint of beer).

[2006] : The Open Source Bet.
By the end of 2015, it will be accepted wisdom that open source provides the only viable mechanism of creating competitive markets in the utility computing world. It will dominate this space and be considered the norm.

[2006] : The JS Bet.
By the end of 2015, JavaScript will be seen as a rapidly growing enterprise language for developing entire applications, both client and server side.

[2007] : The Broker Bet.
By the end of 2013, we will see adverts for computer resource brokers.

[2008] : The Three Step Bet.
By the end of 2013, Oracle would have bought Sun in order to get into the cloud space, RedHat would have bought Novell and Microsoft will have bought Canonical.

[2009] : The Escape Button Bet.
By the end of 2014, VMWare will have divided into two companies, one focused on existing virtualisation technology (IaaS Group) and the other focused on PaaS technology. The IaaS group will have been sold off to another company.

[2010] : The Rackspace Bet.
By Aug 2013, Rackspace will be providing EC2/S3 APIs alongside its own.

Added Friday 25th March 2011
Rather than creating new lists, I thought I'd extend this list.

[2011] : The Apple Bet (@GeorgeReese & @mthiele10)
By the end of 2017, Apple will have or will be in the process of filing for protection under chapter 11 of the U.S. bankruptcy code.

Added Friday 30th July 2012
[2012] : The Public Public bet (@lmacvittie)
By the end of 2016 the common view (as in held more often than alternatives) will be that the future is hybrid as in public / public and that private cloud will be seen as niche.

[2012] The Inertia bet (@jeffsussna)
By mid 2014, a competitive market based around an open source technology which contains at least four IaaS providers (each with >100K servers) that have initiated a price war with AMZN will exist or by 2020 IBM, HP and Dell's server infrastructure business will be in severe decline verging on collapse (unless they have previously exited those businesses).

Added Friday 6th August 2012
[2012] The Modified VMWare Bet (@botchagalupe)
By the end of Feb 2014, VMWare will have :-
1) Acquired Basho or an equivalent company providing distributed storage capabilities to Riak CS
2) Launched an open source IaaS offering.

Added Monday 15th October 2012
[2012] The Amazon Two Factor Market Bet (@jeffsussna)
If GCE (Google Compute Engine) launches at scale with success then by end of 2015 Amazon's AWS consoles will have extended to enable you to control your GCE environment.