Top 10 (2021 PREDICTIONS) in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 1, 2021

Lets light the Sage and smoke out 2020! It's the perfect opportunity this week for a top 10 predictions list for 2021. (for all that our interested the  2020 version is here - looks like I REALLY nailed trend #8.).

1. THE GREAT DISPERSION 1/3 (People): WFH Life is here to stay for many! Along with Zillow and others, Reddit announced this week that employees can work from wherever indefinitely with no salary changes. 2020 has taught most of us that we can be productive from anywhere - want proof? The Economist has some solid data for you.  But where will everyone end up?
2. THE GREAT DISPERSION 2/3 (Product): Products and services bypassed traditional channels like stores, movie theaters (remember them?), and gyms in favor of faster, interaction-free shipments and deliveries. In 2021 the experience that will matter most to customers will be decentralized and mostly a digital only experience - this is the 2021 and onwards new normal. Shopify have this outstanding report covering the future of these eCommerce, retail, and fulfillment trends - a must read.
3. THE GREAT DISPERSION 3/3 (Capital): You can raise Millions from VC's over Zoom and they will care much less  about your business being  based in SF anymore. It's pretty big news and could really decentralize and make access to Capital much more equitable.  Pro-tip read here on how you will be Zoom-judged by the VC's you are pitching to.
4. FOCUS: Many buying decisions were delayed, reduced, or canceled in 2020 - so do you have a plan that will focus your 2021 efforts to grow faster than your competition? SBI have a great focused 4-step process for you to review for 2021.
5. RETENTION: An unintended consequence of the Great Dispersion combined with hopefully a great global economic recovery is that competition for distributed services and products (like SaaS and eCommerce) will explode. Recent research by Salesforce shows that 80% of customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its product or service. Retention of those customers will be running hot and companies will be experimenting like crazy to optimize those uncertain retention challenges
6. PUBLIC CLOUD: An obvious conclusion from all this forecasted digital growth/WFH will be the corollary growth of Cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. The Cloud will be central to post-pandemic new normals. The cloud market grew even faster in 2020 than in 2019, even during the steepest economic contraction in modern history and Gartner is forecasting global public cloud revenue to grow by 19% by 2021.
7. DEMOCRATIZATION OF INNOVATION: I've discussed this in the past under the "No-Code" title. Enterprise departments and divisions are frustrated at the speed their organizations' IT department can deliver digital projects. Welcome to the world of no-code. Technology infrastructure is becoming so commoditized and abstracted that we have now reached a point in time where web services, apps, and integrations can be provisioned visually with zero amounts of code written by departments outside of IT. A great example is the new e-commerce site, Webflow, who is competing against Shopify, BigCommerce and the like and requires no developers/engineers to stand up and manage a web store.
8. CRYPTO-SPRING: The Crypto-winter is over - so this is a bit of a cheat as Bitcoin is on a burn right now along with a lot of other cryptocurrencies (just don't tell Ripple). But investors have traded out of gold as bitcoin has gone on its recent run - it's all still not mainstream as a currency though (more of an asset) , so De-Fi is the sub-set of Crypto outside of Bitcoin's rally to keep an eye on.
9. CHATBOTS: I wanted to mention Product Led Growth - as 2021 will require more reliance on using the product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers. but as I have ranted quite extensively about it in the past, it's not exactly a new trend for 2021. But PLG 2.0 via Chatbots 2.0 works as a trend! Intelligent Self Service support is key to PLG.
10. INTELLIGENCE: aka Data. I can't skip this one. (it was this or 5G). Check this list of 5 trends from Google Cloud. Gartner believe so deeply that data and analytics programs will become even more mission-critical that they created 100 data and analytics predictions through 2021.