Nothing like a little crystal balling to fill up space on the ol’ crap-wide web, eh? Here goes.

– Nothing much changes. The web remains an endless supply of crap occasionally tainted with quality information. Yours truly does little to change that.

– Despite the current outsourcing fears, little happens in the 2K4 to stimulate or depress the job market. Commodity coders continue to lose their jobs, top dawgs continue to hold out for six-figure salaraies that aren’t coming back. Those with reasonable wage demands and great soft skills clean up.

– Software dev finally gets hip to the fact that no one really cares about what language the software was written in. Old tech beats new tech in the 2K4. Old problems get solved really cheaply.

– Paradigm shifters take the biggest risks and post the biggest losses as everyone realizes that no one cares about paradigm shifts.

– Despite the Longhorn hype, .NET gains no more traction in the enterprise than it has for the past 3 years.

– Wages for scripters and other non-engineering software types continue to fall, but never enough to stop us from making a decent living. C programmers continue to make a decent living without having to constantly learn new stuff.

– Internal IT projects, office automation and business process automation become the holy grail of Web Developers as public web-site development falls straight into the hands of the marketing department.

– Small-scale Web shops continue struggle and fail as they attempt to transition from overpriced Design services to IT ousourcing. Ridiculous wages and incompetent staff are mostly to blame.

– XML camps struggle to keep traction as the reality that their products are immature sets in. Web Services and RSS are the exceptions, although the latter never commercializes.

– Markup and design camps struggle to re-tool their skillsets as public-facing Web production continues to become a low-wage job. Dreamweaver jockeys finally get their due.

– ASP.NET fails to revolutionize web development. ‘Classic’ ASP / VB remains entrenched.

– PHP jobs increase while PHP wages decrease.

– CFMX doesn’t sell, but regular CF stays put.

– Java sells, but no one really notices.

– Niche software from small shops continues to threaten big software from big shops. Again, no one cares what language it’s written in.

– Cheap wins.

– Finally, people with careers dependent on pure tech – but lacking any real engineering-level skills – move to management, master a business niche, or simply die.