As we rapidly approach Christmas and head toward the end of the year, I am sure there are many questions as to what the next year will bring. Obviously, the current economic difficulties will still be around, but how will things look on the tech front? While I offer no pretense of being able to provide a detailed answer to that, a review of recent events and news offers some clues about 2009.

For one thing, you might want to be prepared for more expensive flash memory. If you haven't heard yet, Toshiba and SanDisk have decided to cut the output of flash chips by 30 percent on their joint-manufacturing facilities in Japan. This will take place in January 2009, though some rotation in operation will happen as early as this month.

And, oh yes, if you thought you have heard enough about cloud computing already, you can be sure more of it will be coming next year. Of course, one might argue that cloud computing means many things, and is a popular "hype" word. I suppose that's the reason folks over at HP aren't so impressed by the hype surrounding cloud computing. Still, be they Microsoft's Windows Azure, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, or the latest cloud hosting service, that was unveiled by RagingWire this week, you can be sure they will be coming fast and furious.

For a list of top technologies and products in 2008, and which will likely shape--or at least influence--the enterprise next year, check out the list that eWeek Labs came up with, and which I summarized here. Let me know if you agree with it in the comments section. - Paul