This was supposed to be time for my technology predictions for 2015, which I’ll get to yet, I promise, but first I want to explain the major trend I see, that 2015 will become known as The Year When Nothing Happened. Of course things will happen in 2015, but I think the year of truly revolutionary change will be 2016, not 2015. It takes time for trends to develop and revolutionary products to hit the market. I’d say the trends are clear, it’s the products and their manufacturers who aren’t yet identifiable. So here are three areas where I’ll disagree with most of my peers and say I don’t expect to see much visible progress in 2015.
1 — Data security. It will get a lot worse before it gets better. Data breaches in commerce, industry, government, and the military have become so pervasive that we’re being forced as a society into a game change, which is probably the only way these things can be handled. But game changes take time to implement and impose. The basic problems come down to identity, communication, information, and money. You can come at it from any of these directions but the only true solution is to approach them all at the same time. If we can come up with better ways to define identity, to control communication, to secure information, and to define money then it gets a lot harder to steal any of these. None of these will happen in 2015.
An expression that might have jumped out at you as odd is “define money,” but that’s key. We have to add metadata to money — all money. Where did it come from? Who created it? Who had it last? Such smart money would be harder to steal, easier to trace, and therefore more difficult for the bad guys to use. Of course this goes completely in the face of trends like BitCoin, where money is not only identifiable but completely anonymous. Still I see these two trends as allied. BitCoin, while anonymous, embraces completely the concept of money being verifiable. You can’t counterfeit BitCoins. Further defining money is just a matter of adding additional metadata fields. And adding fields can be mandated by those entities that accept money like Central banks. Apple Pay is part of defined money but it needs more features. BitCoin is another piece, but more is needed. We’ll see these broadly discussed in 2015 but nothing will be resolved this year.
2 — Entertainment. We spend so much of our time seeking diversion and so much of our disposable income buying it that anything fundamentally changing these behaviors will bring a revolution. For all the importance given to the word creativity when it comes to entertainment, this industry is for the most part reactive, not active. The TV, Movie, and music businesses want to hang onto the success they already have. But all are in turmoil. I’ve laid this out in column after column, but sometime soon a major cable or phone company is going to go truly a la carte and when that happens the entertainment business will be changed overnight. Again, I predict this won’t happen until 2016, but we’ll see precursors in 2015 like Dish Network’s new Over-The-Top service. Charlie Ergen of Dish is a dangerous man and I like that.
3 — Wearables. The big frigging wearable deal of 2015 is supposed to be the Apple Watch, but it won’t be. The reason is simple — Apple’s watch is too thick, costs too much, and doesn’t have enough battery life. It’s the 128K Macintosh of smart watches. There are ways to solve these problems — ways that are quite obvious to me — but they’ll require new chips that I know are coming but aren’t quite here. So here’s another one for 2016 when I guarantee watches will be thin, cheap, have batteries that last longer than those in your phone, and these watches will do more, too. But they’ll be doing it in 2016.
The Apple Watch is Cupertino grabbing mindshare and early adopter wallets, nothing else.
Kind of depressing to hear we’re just doomed to tread water this year. I’m too optimistic to agree with that view.
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I think the Amazon Echo is pretty interesting and wonder if 2015 will be remembered for adding a talking computer to your home. I agree security sucks and hasn’t turned a corner yet. We might see some 4K “ultra HD” products and announcements this year under “Entertainment”. As for wearables, yes we will see more of them and they mostly will be novelties, in fact I’m not sure they’ll be sorted out at all by 2016.
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Perhaps you’re sensing we’re at a kind of inflection point, where the smartphone and cloud have matured to a point that some really new things need to be invented. That’s what I think, but I think inventors will rise to the occasion.
Quick opinion about the Apple Watch…who in their right mind would spend $400 on an electronic watch that isn’t reasonably waterproof??? Makes no sense in the age of wireless connectivity and charging. The iWatch (or whatever it will be called) ought to be engineered with zero openings and made waterproof to something like 50 meters at least. If it is not, it should be shunned to the nth degree. In my opinion.
Agreed, the Apple Watch looks awesome but I’d never wear a non waterproof watch.
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I’ve recently got a pebble and while it looks a bit blocky its close to a perfect smartwatch, cheap, light, waterproof, long battery life, extendable (ish) and if it could respond to notifications with a canned response for iOS (in a meeting, OK, Nope) I’td be perfect. Hoping the API for notifications is opened when the Apple Watch ships.
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I think the key to pebbles success is it is a smartwatch not a wrist computer.
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For many people, a smart watch is about as relevant as a smart snuffbox.
But the Pebble is so, so ugly. Why would anyone want to wear that? I’d also agree with CdrJameson’s smart snuffbox comment.
there is going to be a fee on every financial transaction if the e-cash side of it has 2k of file added each transaction. storage is not free, and it’s all subject to hacker thievery.
Roku has just announce a deal with Dish call Sling TV “For $20 per month, subscribers will get access to ‘The Best of Live TV’ core package, with 12 top TV networks, including ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, Food Network, HGTV, Cartoon Network and Disney Channel delivered directly through the Roku platform.”
http://blog.roku.com/blog/2015/01/05/sling-tv-a-live-over-the-top-television-service/
That is exciting to see. If they can get the local channels on board, I think this just might be a winner.
Why would they need the local channels on board? There’s this exciting new technology called the “antenna”…
Which is fine if you live in the city, but if you live where you can’t pick up “local channels” with an antenna then local channels over Sling or Roku is interesting
It’s far too likely that we will see a “Halting State” (novel by Charles Stross, search Wikipedia for more) style cyberheist of such proportions that Internet Insecurity can no longer be ignored. http://boingboing.net/2007/10/02/charlie-strosss-halt.html
There’s no real specific metrics for success or “nothing happening” here so you’re going to be correct whatever happens. e.g. by not specifying a range of units sold for Apple Watch in 2015, you get the luxury of classifying any sales figure as consisting entirely of “early adopters” by definition.
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I was a kickstarter investor in pebble watch. I agree with bobruub. The reason I wear it is because it buzzes my wrist and displays when I get a call or text. Everything else is gravy to me. Yes, it’s kind of ugly, but it’s water proof, and the battery lasts a few days. It has some app type things. I hope pebble can keep up with apple.
Though not widely hyped, HP may come out this year with their memristor machine. They had planned (back in 2008) to have it out in 2014 and, obviously, didn’t make that. They now expect it to be out this year (2015 – for the record). It’s memory archetecture is new; HP plans to lay memristor memory directly over the CPU making a very fast connection between the CPU and memory. Today memory access is what most slows down processing (aside from I/O). So the machine will be very fast even with standard CPUs. However, the new memory architecture will require new memory management software and hardware since memory addressing will involve selecting the CPU as well. Memrister memory, like flash RAM, is non-volatile. So things will stay where you put them – even across reboots. Right now they’re giving the new OS the name Linux++. I don’t think sales of this new kind of machine will be heavy in 2015, but it is possible that this new architecture presages a kind of revolution. If HP is able to stand this up this year, we may look back on 2015 as the start of a new era in computing.
I’m not sure, if I was an admin again, I’d like my enterprise machine to come up again from a reboot with the same abend code in memory. sounds like a very expensive ping-pong simulator. I’d expect the OS to zero out the job inodes on restart as a result.
Agreed. The memristor could kickstart a whole new level of tech.
I have become disillusioned with the memristor. Real products are perpetually 3 years in the future (HP is now saying 2018 or later). Will the memristor go the way of bubble memory?
Money metadata can be used for more than the benign purpose of tracking down bad guys. There is also a growing pushback by people against spying of all kinds that may affect adoption of such a thing.
2015 is so over now. I can hardly wait for 2016.
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Cheap oil is going to affect just about everything. People will stop worrying about efficiency and go back to their old wasteful ways. IT will probably be majorly affected by this also.
Is Bob admitting what all the other predictors fail to recognize? Despite our infatuation with rapid innovation, major significant changes in business still need 3-5 years, and even then, can only be recognized in retrospect. 12 months is simply not enough time for major changes to be recognized and acknowledged as such. Hence the saying, “It takes 10 years to become an overnight success.”
On the other hand the capitalist world system could collapse . . . “May you live in interesting times . . . ”
And on a smaller scale, what about Google warning that app usage is threatening it’s revenue model ?
Bitcoin is anonymous in the same way that your gps tracks are anonymous… in practical use they aren’t.
“Apple’s watch is too thick, costs too much, and doesn’t have enough battery life. It’s the 128K Macintosh of smart watches.”
Priceless. And spot-on.
#1 The “maker” hobby will continue to grow, but still be off the radar of most outside the tech community. Intel spent last year getting product ready, now they’re getting the marketing department behind those products. I think they might be able to compete with the Raspberry Pi, but they’ll reman a #2 competitor to all the Arm devices, only because of the crowd nature of the Pi developers. The nice thing about having Intel in the space is that they have a lot of experience producing training materials and documentation.
#2 Bitcoin is getting attention from Wall Street, and Sandhill Rd. There’s some startup money being put into bitcoin for products like ATMs and more secure exchanges. This will still be early adopter/angel investments, but look for more media attention for Bitcoin. Your mom will ask you about Bitcoin.
BiteCon value is dropping rapidly, and Dow Jones (MarketWatch, WSJ) reported today one of the major miners has signed off until it recovers. looking like another bubble… this time a bubble of fake, with no backing, a bubble that the contrarians created and are backing away from. however, funny money that has a slice of IT in it is not dead, it’s just splintering like the Linux world. if you want to confirm that, ask somebody, “hey, what’s the best distro?”
This is of course, off thread. My appologies. The economy is still brittle and prone to another collapse because the core problem that caused the last collapse has not been fixed: the concentration of wealth. More precisely, the amount of resources on the supplys-side of socieity’s (and the worlds) ledger RELATIVE to demand is too great: i.e. Supply-Side saturation. When you have too much supply relative to demand you get deflation (Japan, Europe, UK), investment bubbles and demands for deregulation.
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Supply-side saturation means there’s lots of rich investor type people relative to everyone else. The definition of being rich is not having to work for a living, but instead your money does that for you. Rich people live off of ROI. But when Supply is at saturation level, the world can stomach no more supply, so investors can no longer get decent ROI by investing in building supply. So they demand de-regulation so they can do things that we formerly roped them off from because they are socially unconstructive. Also when some small sector of the economy does offer some ROI, like new technology which brings with it its own latent demand, investors flood into it like moths to a light bulb, creating an investement bubble. We are still swimming in a sea of supply side saturatoin, and until that is fixed the economy will be very brittle.
When you have supply and low demand, then you get lower prices. Most people would consider a lower price for startup investment money to be a good thing.
I’m so sick of ‘smart’. It’s laughable that consumers want smart phones and smart watches…and yet live with the dumbest governments ever conceived of. Has anyone ever noticed that smart isn’t smart. Most of the time it just gets in the way and makes everything more tedious. Wake UP!
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!, right?
Dude, DON’T WAKE THE SHEEPLE!
Witty…not sure I get it but anything that moves the agenda along serves the interest. Honestly, as much as I hear the term sheeple, I kind of work hard to resist it. I see SO many good things coming from humanoids I really want things to work out. My fear is we a just about to broach a line of no return, and something’s gotta break. Been working in tech for 30 years and did plenty of bleeding in the early days, but I had hope that this would all help us advance towards a better world/society. Now-a-days, I’m actually beginning to realize how mistaken I was. And truthfully, I never seem to see anyone making truly decent, bulletproof products. It’s the same game. Push out crap and fix it later has become push out crap and turn some of the fixes into the next paid upgrade while tinkering with the interface so people think they are getting a new product. If anyone out there (Bob) has been around long enough, we came from a much simpler era. It used to be against the law to tap a wired device (that would be phone) and the phone usually cost the family on avg. $20/month. Just couldn’t call outside the neighborhood unless you were rich. Wonder how much the average family now spends on that same family phone? Technology is totally parasitic. Add up the expenses it’s created in your life and ask yourself how you can possibly keep up. After all….got to have that shiny NEW device, right? Bob, what’s your take on the idea floating about the FCC and moving internet under the same regs as old phone regs. If I remember correctly, it used to be against the law to tap a wire without a warrant. If this all moves under the same umbrella, will they be forced by their on rules and regulations to go back to ‘black’?
Maker this that and the other thing is nice to talk about, but far too much is $200 plus for complete implementation. As a father with two in college and one in high school – I can’t afford that very often. The other bug for my family is programming. For those of us lacking an “ear” for languages, programing is a foreign language. One my kids aren’t interested in learning when a commercial product doing this that and the other things will be on the market in 18 months.
Maker spaces let you rent time on a 3D printer or other devices. You usually just pay for materials used and sometimes a membership fee. This will be the trend for the next few years. There’s really no reason to run out and buy a 3D printer at this point.
As for programming, forcing your kids to learn C++ is about as much fun as making them learn Morse code. But teaching them how to use WordPress to make their own blog instead of giving away their information to Facebook and the like might be worth the effort. And if they enjoy it, maybe they’ll dive a little deeper.
But I agree, nerds will continue to be a fringe element. Just make sure that if your kids show an interest in nerdish activity they might get a little encouragement.
That’s it????
2015 — the year the market begins to lose faith in central bankers. Much volatility. Putin lashes out. Venezuela goes tits up. Adios, Maduro!
Techwise, just more cloud. Cloud, cloud, cloud. Apple’s watch will be a big turd. Who wants a big turd strapped to their wrist? Maybe a small turd, but not a big turd.
Of course you know that when you predict nothing will happen, everything happens!
“Apple’s watch is too thick, costs too much, and doesn’t have enough battery life. It’s the 128K Macintosh of smart watches.”
Actually the watch is the iPhone 1 of smart watches. Almost identical issues etc.
Almost forgot, 2015, the year when banks start to adopt cryptographically signed transactions for overnight settlement and world wide payments.
I like the cat.
[…] I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit Robert Cringely’s prediction for 2015 as the year “when nothing happened” and, particularly, his take on the significance and reception of the Apple […]