What’s Not Likely To Happen In 2020

Next year is anticipated to be a pivotal one for a lot of technologies, such as 5G, autonomous vehicles, and IoT, as they move forward into the consumer marketplace, in some form.

However, it’s unlikely that all the trends mentioned in the past few years will come to fruition in 2020. In a new whitepaper, ABI Research has compiled a list of some of those that are unlikely to make the cut.

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IoT is already a huge market for consumers (in the form of smart home devices) and enterprise (in the form of tiny modules that take all sorts of measurements and track item efficiency), but it is rather unconsolidated.

Dan Shey, VP of enabling platforms at ABI, thinks this will remain the same:

“For many years, there have been predictions that the IoT platform supplier market will begin to consolidate, and it just won’t happen. 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.”

Another misconception from the industry is edge computing may overtake or cannibalize cloud growth. Kateryna Dubrova, IoT analyst at ABI, doesn’t see it that way: “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.”

Throughout 2019, we saw headlines confirming the arrivals of self-driving cars on our streets, but ABI analyst Susan Beardslee doubts there will be any commercially available units next year.

Quantum computing is also not coming next year, says AI and ML analyst, Lian Jye Su: “Despite claims from Google in achieving quantum supremacy, the tech industry is still far away from the democratization of quantum computing technology. Quantum computing is definitely not even remotely close to the large-scale commercial deployment stage.”