Readers have been writing to me lately about my annual predictions column, a vestige of my days at PBS. While I’m reluctant to do it, that annual exercise is apparently very popular. And the quality of reader comments lately suggests we could get quite a good discussion going. So I’m going to do it. But, just like Dora the Explorer says, I need your help. If you have any predictions to share for 2011, please send them to me by e-mail (bob@cringely.com) and I’ll include the better ones in that column, giving credit where credit is due so we can both take the heat when we’re wrong.
Remember it’s important to not only predict what will happen but why. Understanding is our goal here and context is critical to that.
Switching gears, the death of Gilmore last week touched a lot of people — far too many for me to reply personally to each. Thanks for your support. We still have Roscoe, Gilmore’s brother, who is in good health. And Roscoe has lately been talking to me about adopting a pug. We’ll see…
Here’s Gilmore and Fallon, my four year-old, taken less than a month ago. Gilmore was Fallon’s best friend:
Few things are as wonderful as a boy and his dog.
There is a mushing saying that your first lead dog teaches you how to be a musher. I think more generically, dogs have great lessons for us on how to be better people, should we care to listen.
Everything I know about my wife, Mary Alyce, I learned from her dog Gandalf.
Gandolf – great name for a dog. white or gray?
This is awesome bob! Thank you.
Could this be the year to predict Team Cringely on the moon? I hope so.
I have to ask but is that a VCR in the background? Are you making a secret statement about the rise of VHS?
Looks like a betamax and beta tapes to me!
Adopting a pug is a great idea. There are several pug rescues across the country. They’re great dogs, lovable & loving & very good with kids.
Definitely, the pug. We had a pug/lhasa named Hoover (as J. Edgar), very laid back and scary smart. If you can find a breeder who does such crosses, I’d recommend it.
I love the hubris of the yearly predictions column. Here’s my contribution.
I predict that people are going to diminish their use of cellphone social networking, and if not 2011 then sometime pretty soon. The reasons are all practical. First of all, some people I know are thinking seriously of dropping themselves out of facebook/myspace/twitter/whatever because it got them in touch with people they don’t really want to know any more & wish they could escape from. Plus, it’s a hassle and a nuisance, witness the Microsoft windows 7 phone commercials showing people fiendishly slaving away on their cell phones while something more important goes by and some bystander asks poignantly, “Really?”. And, another major reason here, we have new laws coming into effect Jan 1 in my Province (Alberta, Canada) that effectively prohibits cellphones from your hands while driving, with great big financial penalties. Oprah had already started her own campaign against “distracted driving” which really means, drop your damn cellphone already and get back to your life. Plus I recently read the cellphone issue of consumer reports wherein they reveal just how costly cellphones are, and how 20% of all subscribers get stung regularly with “bill shock”. Enough bill shock will shake you out of your habits, you know, unless you’ve got a serious dependency to overcome.
BTW I got a blackberry 8100 from work last week so you couldn’t really call me a Luddite anymore. It’s free and it’s the only way I would use it. I updated the OS to 4.5 (german hack) so I can stream MP3s via bluetooth to my car stereo, but other than that I’m struggling to find a use for the thing.
“slaving away on their cell phones while something more important goes by”…Actually, there is not enough information to say what is more important since we don’t know what they are doing on the cell phone. In my own life, random stuff going on around me is never as important or interesting as a phone call I choose to make or a website I choose to go to on my umpc.
I wouldn’t worry too much about laws against cell phones while driving. Here in Ontario it was banned a year ago and after a brief respite, it’s now impossible to drive anywhere without seeing drivers with their phones stuck in their ears. I’ve never heard of it being enforced.
That’ll be a hard, but very useful life lesson for Fallon. I have been fielding lots of life and death questions from my 4 year old and having a hard time coming up with answers he’ll understand without a concrete example to point to.
“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”–“What was, is and always will be” Slaughterhouse Five.
Computers will get faster. Large companies will try to monetize the web at the expense of everyone else. Google will enter a new area. Absolutely everyone from birth will be a member of a band struggling for recognition on social websites–music companies will be formed to LIMIT availability of songs (sorry, that may already have happened). Political donation and bribery will become indistinguishable (whoops, sorry, I definitely missed the timing on that one).
The next Ipad will have an addition that in retrospect seems incredible that it was not already included (I’m going for cork screw, but the smart money says camera). Incorporation of truly narcissistic elements will be the next thing in video game systems.
Excellent site! much success to you 🙂
Hmm. Predictions.
* School text book publishers will be the next to be hit by a downloading scare. After a pair of congressmen denounce downloading as a threat to the future of textbook publishing downloads will double as people who had never thought of that go looking. One publisher announces he is pulling out of the market. Wikipedia announces a collaboration agreement with 2 US states and 3 non-US countries to develop CC licensed textbooks based on peer reviewed, frozen forks of Wikipages.
* Apple will register iGlasses as a trademark but will not put headsets with built in stereoscopic head up displays on the market (not next year anyway).
* The European Union will bring in network neutrality rules. European telecoms companies will denounce this as undermining their profitability and ability to innovate. Six months later they will announce record profits and will buy up the few remaining US mobile companies they don’t own already.
* Google will buy a bunch of companies in Africa and India that offer payment via mobile phones and sign a service agreement with a bunch of european transport companies to operate their stored value payment card systems and announce the rollout of a worldwide payment service. The service will initially not be available in the USA due to anti-trust complaints.
I like that last bit – Do you expect that Visa and Mastercard will make a joint complaint to the FTC?
Some Microsoft front will complain.
I predict.
1) Micro-Loan Scandals will grow in 2011 especially in India and Africa. It will show that touted altruism was never really there in the first place.
2) Apple will still not have a killer desktop app but will be come the defacto HW/OS for apps from companies like Citrix. This locks up both ends of the barn from data slipping out from the datacenter. Apples security by obscurity ecosystem + everything in the glass house makes it hard for the average Joe to leak info.
3) News will be leaked that Windows 7 and Office Suite ’11 have NSA or CIA backdoors/unique IDs slipped into all its documents, screen dumps, printouts. This will be covered by DMCA excuses but really is was ways to track consumers licensing and use that’s been repurposed. Even possible that EU counterparts would be implicated. It would be likely exposed because of anti-terror or protection of children prosecutions.
4) Apple debuts a kickass server 2Q to late 2011. Size of a mac-mini with light peak integrated in ways we cant yet realize — not just the disk bus but integrated possibly with sharing banks of RAM within a cluster as some places do disk today.
5) Apple will somehow integrate 2 & 4 and lockup the apple ecosystem in its NC datacenter.
I look forward to your predictions. The best part, of course was always the look back at the previous years predictions. Then the scorecard of how well you did.
This one could look at the last one you did for PBS. It’s been a couple of yeas, but I’d love to see. I think you usually had a better average than the posts. I seem to remember around 70% for you, and around 60% for us readers.
Very few pundits are brave enough to revisit their predictions. Thank you for being brave.
My prediction:
Android will overtake (and hopefully crush) the iPhone.
Why?
Well first let me declare a strong opinion. I am an Applehata. Well, more specifically I am a Steve Jobshata. My first computer was an Australian clone of a TRS-80 but the first computer I ever used in school was and Apple IIe. The three best early computer games I played were all on Apple too. Moon Patrol, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and some Dungeons and Dragons thing I played on a Mac (“wow! what is that thing with the button?”, “a mouse” my friend said).
But then it all changed. In 1993 I read a book that left me with a very unfavourable opinion of Apple, but specifically of Steve Jobs (poor Woz). What was that book? “Accidental Empires” by Robert X. Cringely.
My real problem with Apple of late has not really been with Jobs, but just with the people who buy Apple. As an IT professional of 15 years experience in infrastructure (most Microsoft) it irks me that people by computers or MP3 players as a fashion item. I have resisted and derided the iPhone for so long that even if I HAD wanted one, I would have had to change jobs and get rid of all my current friends in order to safely avoid justified accusations of hypocrisy.
I recently made the switch from Symbian to Android 2.2 on the HTC Desire HD. The web browsing and email experience on my solid-as-a-rock Nokia E71 was now just too tedious. Having had the device for 3 months and only having got really wet once (it recovered) I am in serious danger being in love with my phone. My iPhone-owning colleagues smile knowingly at my enthusiasm and gently point out that these advantages that I laud are ones that they have been enjoying for years already on their iPhones.
So why will Android overtake (and hopefully crush) the iPhone. Well because all the people like me and those who are slightly uncomfortable with their iPhone will now have choice. Choice of carrier and choice of handset manufacturer. All the Applehatas like me will be free.
Verizon will not release an iPhone until the third quarter at least. Apple has not had nearly enough time to test the capacity of the 4g network and it would be a waste of money to release an iPhone before the network is really and truly available everywhere. They will release an iPad using the same radio chip that will eventually be available on the Iphone as the test bed for widespread implementation.
Verizon will not release an iPhone until the third quarter at least. Apple has not had nearly enough time to test the capacity of the 4g network and it would be a waste of money to release an iPhone before the network is really and truly available everywhere. They will release an iPad using the same radio chip that will eventually be available on the Iphone as the test bed for widespread implementation.
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Remember it’s important to not only predict what will happen but why. Understanding is our goal here and context is critical to that.