2010 is going to be a huge year for tech­no­logy and the drama is already starting to take shape. google’s android will really begin its cam­paign to rape and pil­lage the hand­held market, the massive takeover of sun microsys­tems by oracle, bing attempting to topple google as search engine king, the ongoing war between amd and intel will resume now that lit­ig­a­tion has been settled, you­tube will start char­ging money for videos, and even comcast’s pur­chase of nbc uni­versal may have some inter­esting effects on con­sumers in the united states. here are some of the bigger stories that will affect how we will be using our com­puters this year:

YOUTUBE will start char­ging money:

since google’s epic $2 bil­lion dollar pur­chase of you­tube, it has been trying to figure out how to make money off of the ser­vice. ads now appear at the bottom of every you­tube video you watch, as well as adwords splattered across every other corner of the screen, not to men­tion sponsored videos on the front page and side menu. how­ever, it is hard to ima­gine that all of this could pay for the band­width that you­tube requires at any given time, espe­cially now that you­tube offers high-​definition video as the default video playback.

this week, usa today released an art­icle where google exec­ut­ives have stated that you­tube will start char­ging as much as $5 for cer­tain videos, going for a pay-​per-​view scheme like amazon and apple have done for the last little while. how per­vasive this char­ging for con­tent will be only time will tell, but knowing google, it should be well-​marketed and com­par­at­ively non-​invasive, but should still worry youtube-​addicts. google will need to find a bal­ance for you­tube between its roots as a pet-​project that was started with no money in somebody’s garage and the cor­porate mono­lith that needs to make a profit.

ORACLE taking over SUN MICROSYSTEMS:

yes­terday, the european union approved a $7 bil­lion dollar takeover of sun microsys­tems by oracle cor­por­a­tion, the last great hurdle in the takeover, sending open source pion­eers and advoc­ates into a panic of doom and gloom. for a long time, sun microsys­tems has been one of the “good guys” in the open source and free soft­ware move­ment by har­nessing its pos­i­tion as leader in server hard­ware imple­ment­a­tions, and keeping oth­er­wise luc­rative IP such as java, mysql and open­of­fice free to anyone who wants to use and develop. how­ever, recent years have been tough on sun microsys­tems with losses in the bil­lions. in typ­ical con­glom­erate fashion, oracle was there to snatch it all up at a good price while the peas­ants riot.

to most people, this deal will mean nothing to them on the sur­face. but con­sid­ering this web­site and about 99% of every other web­site out there is prob­ably delivered to you on oracle pipes (routers & servers) and the inform­a­tion is parsed on data­bases (mysql) with pretty web effects (java and its off­spring, ajax), the merger affects many aspects that makes the internet what it is today. at the end of the day, there are going to be changes made, espe­cially when you lose a couple bil­lion dol­lars annu­ally — the first thing you want to do is stop the bleeding. for oracle, this could be a gold­mine. for everyone else, things are a little more uncertain.

AMD finally makes a profit:

with quarterly reports flying out in this last week of january, AMD has finally posted a profit after 13-​straight quar­ters of losses. unfor­tu­nately for AMD, almost the entire chunk of the gains was off the back of a $1.2 bil­lion set­tle­ment with INTEL that was in litigation-​hell for as long as everyone can remember. now the real war starts.

as a long time fan of AMD, i’m happy for them, but they must do a better job at mar­keting them­selves. when INTEL delivers the worlds-​fastest desktop pro­cessor, it lets the entire world know. AMD needs to go back to the for­mula that made them suc­cessful in the first place when they launched their revolu­tionary K6 pro­cessor: pound-​for-​pound king. AMD has always done better than INTEL in every seg­ment of the market when it came to costs com­pared to per­form­ance. while the core i7 is a fast chip, it is mar­keted to a seg­ment that has a lot of money to spend and when cost and value are com­pared, it is not so shiny. on the other hand, AMD’s x4 9xx line of have out­per­formed INTEL’s Q-​series (and in some cases, even beat the highly-​touted core i7) in almost all reviews and bench­marks and are as much as 25% cheaper. INTEL gets away with over­pri­cing its chips based on the value of its brand name. it’s time for AMD to really start showing the value of its brand name.

CHINA and GOOGLE at war:

as reported a few weeks ago on vexed, google declared war on china. google apparently caught china abusing its great firewall to spy on dissidents and political activists as well as stealing technologies and information from companies abroad. china has fired back by saying google's (and by extension, america's) accusations are baseless. google, a company known for its in-house slogan of "don't be evil" (which it has quietly dropped), has shown a little bit of spine after scoffing at the idea that it was in cahoots with china's stringent censorship laws when the two began doing business with each other.

some real­ities need to be framed here: china is the fastest growing market with expo­nen­tial gains in almost every con­ceiv­able seg­ment and has taken over the united states in terms of a con­nected user base. with this in mind, google knows it cannot lose china as a cus­tomer. in the world of busi­ness, you don’t ignore a growing cashcow, and con­sid­ering china still has a long way to go before becoming fully indus­tri­al­ised, there will be milk for a long time to come.

how google will accom­modate western sen­ti­ments of freedom of speech and a need for profits with china’s gov­ern­mental con­trol of con­tent and “one country, two sys­tems” policy will prob­ably be one of the bigger stories in 2010.

but for this blogger, the more inter­esting ques­tion is: how long can china real­ist­ic­ally keep a lid on the internet?