Analyst house ABI Research has pulled together its big guns in each vertical sector to consider how technologywill change things in 2020 – or, rather, how it won’t. Some seasonal Scrooge-like myth-busting is timely and much-needed, it says.
“Knowing what won’t happen in technology in the next year is important for end users, implementors, and vendors to properly place their investments or focus their strategies,” explains Stuart Carlaw, chief research officer at the firm.
Making predictions is easy, perhaps, and the tendency is to cram in all the buzzwords you can. ABI has produced a whitepaper, reflecting on new fewer than 54 tech trends to watch for in 2020. The thing is, of course, some tech just won’t fly, or not in the near-term, at least.
Here, ABI pulls together six technologies that have received considerable speculation and commentary in 2019, but won’t come off – in 2020, anyway.
5G wearables: “While smartphones will dominate the 5G market in 2020, 5G wearables won’t arrive in 2020, or anytime soon,” says Stephanie Tomsett, 5G devices analyst at ABI Research. “To bring 5G to wearables, specific 5G chipsets will need to be designed and components will need to be reconfigured to fit in the small form factor. That won’t begin to happen until 2024, at the earliest.”
Quantum computing: “Despite claims from Google in achieving quantum supremacy, the tech industry is still far away from the democratization of quantum computing technology,” says Lian Jye Su, AI and machine learning principal analyst at ABI. “Quantum computing is definitely not even remotely close to the large-scale commercial deployment stage.”
Self-driving trucks: “Despite numerous headlines declaring the arrival of driverless, self-driving, or robot vehicles, very little, if any, driver-free commercial usage is underway beyond closed-course operations in the United States,” says Susan Beardslee, freight transportation and logistics principal analyst at ABI.
IoT platform consolidation: “For many years, there have been predictions that the IoT platform supplier market will begin to consolidate, and it just won’t happen,” says Dan Shey, vice president of enabling platforms at ABI. “The simple reason is that there are more than 100 companies that offer device-to-cloud IoT platform services and for every one that is acquired, there are always new ones that come to market.”
Edge will overtake cloud: “The accelerated growth of the edge technology and intelligent device paradigm created one of the largest industry misconceptions: edge technology will cannibalize cloud technology,” says Kateryna Dubrova, M2M, IoT & IoE analyst at ABI. “In fact, in the future, we will see a rapid development of edge-cloud-fog continuum, where technology will complement each other, rather than cross-cannibalize.”
8K TVs: “Announcements of 8K Television (TV) sets by major vendors earlier in 2019 attracted much attention and raised many of questions within the industry,” says Khin Sandi Lynn, video and cloud services analyst at ABI. “The fact is, 8K content is not available and the price of 8K TV sets are exorbitant. The transition from high definition (HD) to 4K will continue in 2020 with very limited 8K shipments – less than 1 million worldwide.”
