Today's Technology for Tomorrow's Firm.
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January/February 2014 • www.CPAPracticeAdvisor.com 13 THE BLEEDING EDGE except to note that the last one was only half true. W hile "app stores" fourish, both the number of apps available and their sales numbers are dismal at best. We'll cut short the discussion of which others held true to save space for the trends to come in 2014. But I would be remiss not to note that this is the 20 th consecutive year we have done this column, predicting technology trends. And that we are nearly always right. PREDICTIONS: 2014 TECHNOLOGY TRENDS • GPS devices are going the way of the wrist watch. And for the same reason – they are being supplanted by the cell phone. It is a major problem for com- panies like Magellan, Tom-Tom and Garmin that Google is ofering its GPS navigation for free on cell phones. Smartphones feature a screen every bit as large as the best GPS navigation unit, but for free. Te GPS mapping compa- nies can't aford to lower their sofware prices from $89.95 or more to just $.99, and they can't add enough features to make their hardware more atractive than your average smartphone. The result will be a bloodbath, this year, with few survivors except Garmin lef standing. Oh, and that will make 2014 a great time to buy a GPS unit for your auto due to free-falling prices. • Voice Command will become a major batleground. Twelve states, the Dis- trict of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the US Virgin Islands prohibit all drivers from using hand-held cell phones while driving. Beginning in October 2013, all laws were designated primary enforcement —an ofcer may cite a driver for using a hand-held cell phone without any other trafc ofense taking place. Some 37 states and DC ban all cell phone use by nov ice drivers , and 20 states and DC prohibit it for school bus drivers . In addition, 41 states , DC, Puerto Rico, Guam and the US Virgin Islands ban text mes- saging for all drivers. Te point of all of these laws is that users of smart- phones won't be able to use them… without hands-free operations. Te technology of speech-to-text and vice versa was once a sleepy little side- technology mostly being pushed by Nuance with its Dragon Naturally Speaking products. Now Microsof and Google are in the fray, with Apple not far behind. Look for voice com- mands to become better and more useful in 2014. • Hardware costs will fall. Look for v ir tually ever y kind of computer hardware except laptops to take a nosedive in 2014. Memory, drives, printers, monitors and motherboards will become cheap as manufacturers shed their high inventories and keep the factories running. Places to look for bargains include SD storage devices, R AM memor y, solid-state drives, printers and monitors. Tis is likely the year to invest in dual monitors for tax and audit work, if the firm has not already done so. Also, an increase in R AM for office computers and an upgrade in laser printers will be good investments. • Identity thef will become a major issue. Identity thef has changed dra- matically in the past decade. W hile there are still hackers and phishers and insecure Wi-Fi to worry about, the bulk of the network intrusions that lead to identity theft don't happen when consumers visit the wrong websites. Te name of the game today is to hack a major company that collects personal information, which includes virtually every company in the US. While some companies, like Amazon.com, take the security of this information seriously, many do not. Look for Congress to address this by fnally holding compa- nies financially responsible for not securing data from their customers. Tis won't happen in 2014, but it will include accounting frms when it does happen. • Cloud Computing adoption rates will continue to be slow. Talk to sofware vendors who just happen to have cloud-based solutions they are hawking, and they will tell you that THIS IS THE YEAR for accountants to adopt cloud computing. Many tax and accounting frms, however, stub- bornly refuse to move to the cloud. It is not that they are technology Lud- dites, but rather that they have concerns that are not being addressed. W hile online accounting sofware is robust and successful, cloud storage of client data is not. Cloud storage systems sufer from a lack of automatic backup capabilities, lack of auto-synchroniza- tion without third-party sofware, and a general lack of reliability. While the worst ofender is Microsof's SkyDrive, others also have these shortcomings. Truth is, until cloud storage systems resolve these problems they will not see major adoption by accounting frms that value their clients' data. • Windows 9 will be rushed to market in 2014. Microsof is failing on so many fronts that the executive offices in Redmond must be in full panic. Instead of driving PC and laptop sales, Win- dows 8 has been such a disaster that the company is lef teetering and vulner- able. Ofce 2013 is failing. Its cloud storage solution, SkyDrive, is not only failing, it faces a name change due to a court loss over its name. Windows 8, for all of its wonderful atributes, has a user interface that has lef both con- sumers and business customers feeing in panic. At this point, Microsof needs to bury Windows 8 and fx Ofce 2013. Tough most pundits think it will take until 2015 for Windows 9 to appear, I look for it to make its frst appearance for public beta before the end of this year. • Microsof will be challenged on the desktop. Because Windows 8 has been such a massive failure on almost every platform, competitors are ramping up. Apple's iOS will not be a major com- petitor, simply because Microsof has such heavy investments in Apple. But Google is under no such constraints, and is working hard to make its desktop solution real enough to challenge the Microsof dominance of the desktop. And to make the game even more interesting , Mozilla (makers of the Firefox browser) has announced the Firefox OS for smartphones and tablets. A move to the desktop is only a mater of time, and for the frst time in nearly 30 years Microsoft will face serious cpa_12-14_McClure.indd 13 2/5/14 1:27 PM