Neil McAllister

Even among people as logical and rational as software developers, you should never underestimate the power of myth. Some programmers will believe what they choose to believe against all better judgment.

The classic example is the popular fallacy that you can speed up a software project by adding more developers. Frederick P. Brooks debunked this theory in 1975, in his now-seminal book of essays, "The Mythical Man-Month."

Twenty years ago, when Linus Torvalds first announced his new operating system project to a Usenet discussion group, he had no way of knowing that his creation would one day conquer the world.

"Just a hobby, [it] won't be big and professional," Torvalds wrote on Aug. 25, 1991. In a follow-up post, he added, "Simply, I'd say that porting [the OS to a different CPU] is impossible." Torvalds had begun the project as a fun way to teach himself about the Intel 80386 processor and nothing more. His greatest ambition was merely to see it work.

Developers must be masochists. How else to explain all the negative reactions to Microsoft's newfound enthusiasm for HTML5 and JavaScript? First Microsoft said it would integrate the Web standards into the next version of Windows, now it says it will do the same with Office -- and in both cases, developers have done nothing but complain. Why?

Here's how it stands with Office right now: Users can script the Office components using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a proprietary Microsoft scripting language that's a subset of Visual Basic 6. VB6 itself was a lousy language with an ugly, cumbersome syntax; Microsoft ended all support for it in 2008, and I have yet to hear a single developer mourn its passing. Unfortunately, however, VBA lingers on.

Few companies have made a splash in the tech industry as big as Google has. Launched by Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Page's Stanford University dorm room in 1998, the company became a $27 billion titan overnight when it went public six years later. Soon it was the darling of Silicon Valley, sweeping competitors aside and taking Microsoft head on. For a while, at least, it seemed Google could do no wrong.

On June 30, 2011, Larry Page closed his first full quarter as Google's new CEO, succeeding Eric Schmidt. Page has never led a public company, and the pressures of leading Google certainly differ from when he last held the helm in 2001. In January, Page told the New York Times, "One of the primary goals I have is to get Google to be a big company that has the nimbleness and soul and passion and speed of a startup."

Google thinks you should do all of your computing on the Web. To prove its point, the company has been working to replace traditional desktop software with Web-based alternatives, such as Gmail and Google Docs. When Internet Explorer and Firefox struggled to handle those complex applications, Google launched its own browser called Chrome, igniting a features war that has improved JavaScript performance and Web standards support in every major browser.

The very pinnacle of Google's vision of a Web-based world, however, must surely be Chrome OS, a new operating system built entirely around the Chrome browser. Laptops running Chrome OS, called Chromebooks, are designed from the ground up to be Web-connected in every way. Following a pilot program last year, the first Chromebooks are now shipping to consumers, so I decided to take one of the two new models -- the Samsung Chromebook Series 5 3G -- and see how well Google's device stacks up to traditional notebooks and traditional computing units.

With their larger screens, long-lasting batteries, and powerful CPUs, tablets seem well suited for the kinds of rich multimedia applications that confound ordinary smartphones. But Apple famously won't allow Adobe Flash on its iOS mobile devices, including the iPad. This fued creates an ideal opportunity for competing tablet makers to step in and fill the void.

Right now, the iPad's top competitor is the Motorola Xoom, which has been available in the United States from Verizon since February. The Xoom is the first device to ship with Google's Android 3.0 OS, code-named "Honeycomb," which features a new UI "designed from the ground up for tablets."

OpenOffice.org is one of the leading competitors to the Microsoft Office suite of business productivity applications. Originally developed as StarOffice in the late 1990s, the suite had been managed in recent years by Sun Microsystems as an open source project. But when Oracle acquired Sun in April 2009, the future of Sun's software offerings -- particularly free ones like OpenOffice.org -- was called into question. Before long, key OpenOffice.org developers, unhappy with the status quo under Oracle, began defecting from the project.

The result was LibreOffice, a new fork of the OpenOffice.org code base that's maintained by a nonprofit organization called the Document Foundation. LibreOffice looks like OpenOffice.org and it runs like OpenOffice.org. It even reads and writes OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument file formats. The difference is that LibreOffice is being developed in a fully community-driven way, without oversight from Oracle. (The "libre" in the suite's name is derived from a Latinate root meaning "liberty.")

Google says it has a vision of the future of software. And since Google is without doubt one of the most important and innovative computing vendors today, independent developers would do well to pay attention. The question is, which vision should we pay attention to?

The usual story casts Google and Microsoft as polar opposites: Microsoft, the lumbering, old-world behemoth of retail software, and Google, the young, agile champion of cloud computing. In a Google future, Web-based Google Apps would replace traditional office suites, databases, and messaging clients, while cloud storage and services would eliminate the need for on-premise data centers.

The author William Gibson is often credited with inventing the concept of cyberspace in his near-future science fiction novels, beginning with "Neuromancer" in 1984. But while Gibson's imagined world has been hailed as remarkably prescient of the Internet Age, Gibson himself points out that he missed at least one important prediction: None of his characters had cell phones. Can't win 'em all, I guess.

Undaunted -- or maybe just too dumb to give up -- we tech pundits keep forging on with our own visions of the future. Although we seldom peer more than a year ahead, getting even that right is difficult enough. That's why I always like to look back at my New Year's predictions from 12 months ago to score my successes and failures. If nothing else, it keeps me honest. Read on to see how well I foresaw the software development milestones of 2010.

As last week's post highlighted, predicting the future can be a tricky business, especially in a market as volatile as IT. With the global economy still in dire straits, I don't foresee a lot of fireworks in the software development space for 2011, but with as many loose threads as were left dangling this year, there are bound to be a few interesting advances. Let's see what my crystal ball has to offer.

Java and beyond
Naturally, the issue on many developers' minds will be what to do about Oracle. Ever since the database giant completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January, it has moved aggressively to consolidate its control over Sun's technology portfolio, with Java developers squarely in the cross fire.

The more Google's Web-based services encroach on Microsoft's traditional markets, the more Microsoft seems determined to bring the fight to Google's home turf by offering online services of its own. Redmond's first stab at cloud services for business was Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS), a package that bundled hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint Server, and Communications Server. Now it's ready to try again with Office 365, a revamped offering that combines the features of BPOS with Office 2010. From what we've seen of the Office 365 beta, it still has a long way to go before it can be considered a true turnkey solution for business.

Microsoft plans to offer Office 365 in a number of service tiers, ranging from a stripped-down small-business version to one packaged for large-scale enterprises. The most attractive tiers bundle a full license to Office Professional Plus 2010 for each user, which is arguably Microsoft's greatest advantage over online-only competitors such as Google Docs. You can save a little money if you already have your own Office licenses or if you plan to conduct all your document management in the Office Web Apps -- but we think the latter is unlikely.