Juha Saarinen: Tech predictions for 2023

OPINION:

So, 2022 has been really quite spectacular in every respect. From a tech business point of view, we’ve seen huge mergers, some of which aren’t yet complete, like Microsoft buying games developer Activision ($108
billion) and chipmaker Broadcom dropping a cool $95.5b on virtualization company VMware.

Vast amounts of money, like Elon Musk buying Twitter for almost $70b, only to turn it into a far right hellscape that’s driving users and advertisers to quit.

With interest rates spiking and both consumers and businesses curtailing spending, it would be amazing if there were more such exuberant billion-dollar deals next year. Fire sales seem more likely, possibly even for well-known tech brands.

If the market works as imagined, the upside of the above should be that everything gets cheaper. Oh, wait. Subscription prices are going up steeply as rising inflation means Big Tech has to raise prices to keep shareholders happy.

That said, hardware should become less expensive as Covid-induced chip and component shortages that plagued just about every industry sector this year ease while demand tapers off.

Next year would in theory be a great time to grab some bargain tech deals, except any spare cash users might have will go towards rising mortgages and inflated grocery prices instead.

Most of that tech is still made in China, but for how long? See, China has shot itself in the foot with overly aggressive assertive politics, while others have accused the country of human rights abuses.

So much so that the United States now provides massive subsidies to bring manufacturing back to its shores.

This includes giant chip-making factories. The US knows it can ill afford to lose its pole position in tech, and started wincing when rumors popped up that China would invade Taiwan to gain control over TSMC, the world’s largest chip maker.

Furthermore, existing electronics manufacturing in China has become strife-torn. Workers at Foxconn – which makes expensive iPhone Pros for Apple – have been rioting because of working conditions and Covid restrictions. Such unrest could spread.

Apple is looking at supply chain diversification as a result. Watch this space. That trend will accelerate next year.

It won’t speed to New Zealand however. Everything’s too expensive here, and we don’t have basic transport infrastructure like developed train networks.

While we could tempt Big Tech with renewable energy, which is very important to have on corporate balance sheets, and political stability, there aren’t enough skilled engineers and workers here. Manufacturing in NZ was put to sleep decades ago unfortunately.

We will have data centers galore though, mainly in Auckland. US names like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and local outfits like Datacom, CCL and Datagrid are just a few companies setting up in New Zealand. You’ll need to learn to use HyperScalers instead of data center operators in 2023.

Will our renewable electricity generation be sufficient to power a slew of giant data centers? We’re about to find out. Let’s hope the power supply will be robust enough so that the armada of smoky and noisy diesel back-up generators for the data centers won’t have to fire up very often.

Building new dams for the big additional water supplies required by data centers probably isn’t a silly idea for next year either.

At the user infrastructure end of things, the UltraFast Broadband network rollout is coming to an end with the final bit going live in Opononi. We shouldn’t stop there though and continue to get UFB-equivalent broadband to as many of the approximately 835,000 people and 600,000 rural businesses that are currently underserved.

We did it with electricity supply and the copper telephone network. Leaving the broadband supply to overseas low earth orbit satellite companies incorporated in tax havens instead of with local providers is just wrong on multiple levels.

At the rate cryptocurrency exchanges are failing, with billions and billions of real and virtual money vanishing, 2023 could be the year when blockchain, Bitcoin and whatever become unfashionable. Especially so with commentators who think a slow, inefficient and poorly scalable database is the magic solution to every software issue on the planet.

Speaking of software, artificial intelligence (AI), the algorithmically jazzed-up regular expressions with statistical analysis, will be on everyone’s lips next year, with an increasing number of data centers providing the enormous amount of computing power to sift through an endless amount of information collated from the internet.

AI couldn’t have happened without the runaway social experiment that is the internet, in other words. Asking OpenAI’s ChatGPT where it’ll all end didn’t work however, as the site has become so popular and overloaded that it is now unusable.

Will next year see a solution to the collision between stronger security for everyone and the demands from politicians, police and signals intelligence spooks to be able to eavesdrop on communications?

Probably not. You have to feel for even Big Tech in that respect. On the one hand, they’ll be prosecuted if they don’t provide safety with strong end-to-end encryption for users, as data breaches and privacy law violation penalties become the norm. If they beef up security, governments will go after them because of interception laws and national security requirements. In either case, being a somewhat tech-savvy lawyer is a hot career tip for 2023.

It’s an exciting year ahead, and no correspondence will be entered into over the entirely accurate predictions above.