2009 in review: Tech buzzwords

Phil Muncaster

Could 2009 go down in history as the most over-hyped year in technology ever? Well, it has certainly had a fair bit of competition. Surely there's no other industry known to man that does the same line in cringeworthy, semantically-jumbled, syntactically crippled parlance, and passes it off as cutting-edge banter? Apart from perhaps management consultancy.

Yes, for all your seamless, holistic, end-to-end, cradle-to-grave, off-the-shelf, drag-and-drop solutions, join us on a magical mystery tour around the wonderful world of IT.

First up: Web 2.0. Despite all the economic doom and gloom this year, at least we know something reasonably positive came out of 2009 – the gradual disappearance of this over-used buzzword. Coming to symbolise all that was whiz bang and cutting edge about the post-dot com wave of new companies, Web 2.0 came to signify a vast number of disparate technologies and concepts including user-generated content, blogs, social networks, Ajax and more besides. Thank god the web has finally gotten mature enough to dispense with this inappropriate catch-all and people are actually referring to each of these individual things by their rightful names.

But then just as we get rid of Web 2.0, its successor comes slinking round the corner. Yes, Tim Berners-Lee's idea of a semantic web is obviously not catchy enough, because what you're more likely to hear it referred to next year is Web 3.0. Given that it involves the concept of the web as he originally imagined it - a web of data that machines can read and make sense of - it should more correctly be known as Web 2.0, but I suppose that's not going to happen now, is it?

High on the list of expiring buzzwords this year has been software-as-a-service (SaaS), which has become somewhat overshadowed by its older relative cloud computing, more of which later. Next year we're much more likely to hear about platform-as-a-service (PaaS) vendors who can supply the entire IT ecosystem, led by SaaS, and now PaaS, pioneer Salesforce.com. Every sub-section of the tech software industry from desktop productivity to CRM to e-commerce will be queueing up to herald their own PaaS stars. Just you wait.

Virtualisation is not going away anytime soon, but we can't think of anything even remotely interesting to say about it. The same goes for SOA. Which leads us on to one of the biggest buzzwords of the year – set to carry on well into 2010 on the virtual shoulders of attention deficit disorder afflicted self-important bores everywhere. Yes, it's Twitter, and every one of its nauseating variations. Tweet, twitterer, twestival, tweet-up, twoosh, twitterzine, twitosphere, twiterrati, twitterrhea, tweetaholism and twittcrastination, to name but a few. The only thing that can be assured, is that this list of Twitter variants will grow ever-longer and more tenuous until the whole thing is either bought or marginalised.

Which brings us finally to the Daddy of them all - the Big Kahuna, the Numero One, the Real Deal, the star of the show: cloud computing. No one in the V3.co.uk office knows for sure when the term started appearing on our radar, but it's certainly wallowing in media attention now, thanks to the likes of Amazon Web Services.

We can expect the hype to continue well into 2010, although the important data security and compliance issues that have yet to be answered by many public cloud providers mean widespread adoption of the model is still some way off. Still, that won't prevent every press release falling into our inbox from now until next Christmas from featuring those hallowed words. Note to vendor community: We know what you're up to.