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Personal and Professional Resolutions for 2009

By Nick Hodge | January 1, 2009

Godley Head, Christchurch

2009 is going to be a rough year

The time between the end of 2008 through the begin­ning of 2009 is an arti­fi­cial bound­ary. Just because the moon enters a new cycle, and sci­ent­ists have added an extra second to time, does not auto­mat­ic­ally mean all is going to be well.

Unpre­ced­en­ted change is com­ing to all levels of the sys­tem in which we live and work in the com­ing 12 months. Driven by the global fin­an­cial crisis, global warm­ing, and a dra­matic change to the US Pres­id­ency; the mech­an­isms of the fin­an­cial industry, more back­ground levels of polit­ical unrest, China growth wobbles. The list goes on. The world is going to change, and not just because Pres­id­ent Obama wishes it so.

Never a bor­rower nor a lender be

Fes­ter­ing in Wall Street for many months, it began with the Leh­man Bros col­lapse. 30 other banks were either nation­al­ised or went bank­rupt within weeks. The stable post-war bank­ing sys­tem has failed. (note: Hedge funds star­ted in 1949, more inform­a­tion on the cur­rent credit crisis)

Hedge funds and other fin­an­cial engin­eers dis­coun­ted risk, and found that what the mar­ket giv­eth, and the mar­ket also taketh away. With the with­drawal of easy credit in the mar­ket, con­sumer and cor­por­ate spend­ing has slowed significantly.

There are issues with the gov­ern­ment bail­outs and buy outs: the profits over the last 10 years has accrued to the few, whilst the losses have been social­ised to the tax­payer. The only upside is if the large bail­outs increases the velo­city of money, and churns in pos­it­ive ways within the eco­nomy. Giv­ing credit to the non-creditworthy is not sustainable.

Easy credit, once the oil of busi­ness and the way con­sumers lived up to lives they expec­ted, has dis­ap­peared. Using credit, either obtained from credit cards or hous­ing refin­an­cing: cash­ing out the per­ceived value of a prop­erty; is spend­ing money from the future. A small scale per­sonal ponzi scheme that only works if the future is bright.

How­ever, the future is not always bright. Per­ceived value is at the whim of the markets.

There is no global upside until 2010 at the earli­est. Sadly, 2009 is not going to be magic­ally brighter than 2008. And Access Eco­nom­ics has stated that Aus­tralia is likely to exper­i­ence a reces­sion in 2009.

Crisis as a Catalyst

Why all the rhet­oric and pess­er­mism above? Where is the optim­ism? What about the future? The world has sur­vived these bad eco­nomic times before!

Firstly: Lower free con­sumer cash via easy credit equals less spend­ing res­ults in reduced cor­por­ate revenue.

As the cor­por­ate report­ing sea­son starts in mid Janu­ary through to mid March, the full cor­por­ate impact and cost of the crisis will be revealed.

The reduc­tion in cor­por­ate rev­en­ues, and there­fore expendit­ures will demand dra­matic changes; busi­ness as usual will not be sus­tain­able. The status quo can­not be sup­por­ted. Now is the time to trot out the sac­red cows and to ask: do we con­tinue to feed this cow, or eat it now?

With a reces­sion, the rev­enue doesn’t magic­ally stop; find­ing it becomes more dif­fi­cult. Good man­agers should and will ree­valu­ate every dol­lar spent.

My IT Industry Predictions

For 2009, there is one them­atic word: Aus­ter­ity

  1. Online Social Net­work­ing will break out of walled gar­dens of sites and appear in desktop apps and on web sites. Some of these place­ments will be surprising.
  2. Weav­ing into social graphs will become the new search engine optimisation
  3. Oper­at­ing Expenses Squeeze: Less cor­por­ate travel, more vir­tual meet­ings: video con­fer­en­cing, shared white­boards, use of social tools.
  4. Any product/service that cuts costs will suc­ceed in the main­stream: Net­books, IPTV, VoIP, small cars. All premium brands and premium product lines will sur­vive in the face rev­enue challenges.
  5. Clouds on the hori­zon can some­times have a digital lin­ing. Based on the needs of the above four drivers, apps that live online and can mash together in a scal­able way will succeed.
  6. The future is dynamic. Plat­forms that will suc­ceed in 2009 will be based on two lan­guages: Ruby (Rails, Merb and oth­ers) and Javas­cript (Lar­ger, more com­plex apps as per­form­ance increases).
  7. The semantic web will slowly emerge. Before the full RDF revolu­tion comes the evol­u­tion of micro­formats, but there needs to be more and bet­ter tool­ing across all vendors.
  8. From the ashes of 2008/9 will emerge the next large, prof­it­able suc­cess story. Call­ing who this suc­cess is will be a sport amongst pun­dits through 2009. Twit­ter is my call. They may get pur­chased or develop a rev­enue model.

Per­sonal Strategies for 2009

So, from these obser­va­tions, what does it mean me personally?

  1. Fol­low the Social
  2. There will be a little less travel; countered by a little more time in the office.
  3. Cloud is the future. Look for the digital lining
  4. Dynamic (and func­tional) language-based plat­forms made on the changes the devel­op­ment game

Cal­en­dar year 2008 is a mere road bump that is the year ahead called 2009. Buckle up, and hang on.

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