The biggest question left unanswered in my mind is the role state will play in software of the future.
That seems like an absurd statement, or a naïve one at the very least. State is everywhere:
The values held in memory.
Data locally on disk.
Data in-flight that is being sent over a network.
Data stored in the cloud, including on a database, remote filesystem, etc.
Certainly all of these kinds of state will continue to exist far into the future. Data is king, and is one major factor that will drive the shift to parallel computing. The question then is how will concurrent programs interact with this state, read and mutate it, and what isolation and synchronization mechanisms are necessary to do so?
Alexis Sgavel on 06 Apr 11Here is the harsh reality of e-commerce websites: according to recent e-commerce studies, at least 59.8% of potential customers abandon their shopping cart (MarketingSherpa puts it at 59.8%, SeeWhy at 83% and MarketLive at 62.14%). The main question is why do customers abandon their shopping cart so often? Is there some fundamental mistake that designers of e-commerce websites do very often? Are there any common guidelines or rules of thumbs that make it more difficult for our users to purchase products? And is there some meaningful way to improve the conversion rates for our products?
