I couldn’t put it off any longer so here are my technology predictions for 2017. I’ve been reading over my predictions from past years and see a fundamental change in structure over that time, going from an emphasis on products to an emphasis on companies. This goes along, I’d say, with the greater business orientation of this column. That makes sense with a maturing market and mature industries and also with the fact that a fair number of readers are here mainly as investors, something that didn’t used to be so much the case.
Of course we begin with a look at my predictions from a year ago to see how I did. Almost nobody in my line of work does this, pointing out their own mistakes, but then I always have been kind of stupid about my career. So here we go.
Last year I predicted the beginning of the end for engineering workstations. My rationale was that virtualization was going to move a lot of this work into the cloud, technical software companies would be converting their products into services, and that it would all be enabled by the addition of GPUs to cloud servers. This is going a little slower than I had thought but is definitely happening. It’s good, though, that I only claimed it was the beginning of the end. I’ll claim this as correct and I’ll even have more to say about it for this year.
I predicted that both Microsoft and Apple would hit walls in 2016. I’d say there is no doubt that Apple hit something like a wall and if you’ll go back to the actual column you’ll see what I meant about Microsoft was that Windows 10, while a huge success in terms of upgrades, would be an ever smaller component of Microsoft’s success. I’ll claim these both as true.
I predicted my Steve Jobs movie would return to Netflix, which it did though not until the middle of the year. Look for it to stay there until the middle of 2019, by the way.
I predicted that drones and driverless cars would not really hit the market in 2016 despite all the hype. This is certainly true about cars but if you’ll check the actual column you’ll see I was talking specifically about outfits like Amazon using drones for commercial deliveries. Those have happened, sure, but you can count them on one hand so I’m claiming both predictions as correct.
I predicted the Internet of Things would become a security nightmare and that definitely happened when home routers began to turn into zombies. It’s only going to get worse, though I’ll hold off on predicting specific remedies until a year from now because it will take that long (or longer) for the pain to become large enough to help the smoke clear. This will be a major prediction area for me in 2018.
I predicted Apple would not buy Time Warner (AT&T did) but said Apple would buy the Dish Network, which they did not, so I finally got one wrong. My thinking here was that Apple was too paralyzed to buy Time Warner but when AT&T bought DirecTV it seemed like Apple might be inspired to buy the other satellite operator, Dish, though as much for its wireless spectrum as for the satellite operation. I still think Apple should have done it. One right, one wrong.
Finally I predicted that Intel would start to become irrelevant, which is definitely the case. What processor is in your PC? You don’t know, do you? More on this below.
So by being vague I managed to claim 90 percent correct. Maybe I should retire with that? Not a chance!
For 2017 I am taking a Big Picture approach to my predictions. Where last year there were 10, this year there are only six but they are all enormous and interconnected. Read each one and think about the others. There are sub-predictions I could have made by looking at the likely impact of the big predictions on established companies. For example we’ll see a continued decline in the role of the standalone PC. I think PCs are going to disappear completely from government, thanks to Edward Snowden, starting in 2017. I suppose that could have been a prediction. And with PCs declining and the cloud booming we’ll see an accelerated transition to software-as-a-service (SAAS) from all major software companies. While that, too, could have been a prediction, why bother since it is so obvious? Here are the big ones.
Prediction #1 — A Cloud Arms Race If 2016 was the year of the cloud then 2017 will be the year of the CLOUD!!! Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all staked their corporate futures on their cloud services and are throwing investment dollars in that direction. We’re talking about major infrastructure upgrades measured in multiple billions per year per company. Like last year a lot of this has to do with the introduction of high-end GPUs into cloud servers but this year there is a second provider — AMD. As always, competition will push prices down and performance up. Amazon just made a HUGE buy that will be matched or exceeded by both Microsoft and Google. There is no practical limit to what these three companies will pay to get and stay ahead. This can only be good for users of cloud services.
It can only be bad for cloud competitors. IBM, for example, simply doesn’t have the firepower to compete on this level so they’ll try to redefine the playing field as a hybrid cloud where IBM customers are the ones making the big capital investments. This will keep them in the game but not as a major player.
The dark horses in this arms race are Apple and Oracle. While Apple seems content to develop its own cloud services, the company clearly has the deep pockets and data center capacity to do much more. But will they? There’s a prediction about that below. As for Oracle, Larry Ellison has been making Trumpian pronouncements about how Oracle’s success in the cloud is going to be YUGE. If he doesn’t deliver soon, it won’t be.
Prediction #2 — The End of Bufferbloat You may recall a few years ago I included bufferbloat in my predictions and it was probably the first time most readers had even heard of this problem that afflicts most ISPs and home networks. Well the technical work has finally been done to kill bufferbloat with superior Open Source router firmware. Router manufacturers are finally figuring out that Open Source is cheaper and better. And ISPs are almost ready to kill bufferbloat outright as explained in the next prediction. It is going to happen and the result will be noticeably better streaming audio and video services. This is not only a big deal, for most users it won’t even require new network hardware.
Prediction #3 — The Beginning of the End for U.S. Broadcast (and cable!!) Television There are a lot of moving parts to this one and it won’t all come together in 2017 but enough will happen to make the endgame obvious. I laid-out a decade ago where Internet Service Providers were logically headed in the USA. That is toward becoming bit schleppers and landlords for over-the-top (OTT) video services like Netflix. The necessary antecedents for this to happen are: 1) a market for broadcast license holders to sell their spectrum for mobile use; 2) a rise in OTT providers that directly compete with traditional cable TV companies, and; 3) the death of net neutrality.
The FCC is already operating reverse auctions to facilitate the transfer of spectrum in exchange for up to $100 billion. Most of that money will go into the pockets of investors through share buy-backs but some will be used to jumpstart next-generation entertainment services. OTT services are booming and the critical event that happened only a few days ago was when CBS decided to participate in the live OTT service to be introduced this year by Hulu. That will give the Hulu service all four U.S. broadcast networks, the first time that has happened, and it’s a game-changer. CBS’s move would not have happened when it did had not it been clear that the Trump Administration intends to kill net neutrality, which will allow ISPs to charge OTT providers for access.
Explaining this OTT/ISP connection deserves its own paragraph. Let’s use as an example Comcast, though this could apply to almost any large ISP. Comcast is America’s largest ISP by far as well as being America’s largest cable TV company. But if you dig through the Comcast financials you’ll find that not only does the company make more profit from providing Internet service than it does from selling video service — Comcast pretty much makes no money at all selling video. The fees Comcast pays to cable and broadcast networks and independent stations take all the money. If Comcast could just get out of the video carriage business and become strictly an ISP they’d make more money with less hassle as a smaller, simpler organization. But the psychological prerequisite for this happening is finding a new revenue source made possible with the demise of net neutrality, because companies have a hard time selling change that only makes them smaller. With net neutrality out of the way (understand I’m not taking a position one way or the other on this, though I personally tend to favor net neutrality) Comcast can go from paying for video content to being paid for video content — a fundamental change of business model. They’ll still own NBC and all the cable channels, but those channels will eventually be available strictly OTT. This will take 2-3 years to sort out but once net neutrality is gone the result is pretty much inevitable.
Going back to bufferbloat, once the ISPs can charge the OTT networks then the OTT networks can demand better service and that’s the moment when bufferbloat will instantly disappear.
Prediction #4 — Intel spins-off its fab. Intel is in trouble. Yes the company is huge and rich and profitable but it also doesn’t really understand the new world in which it is trying to operate. Intel missed the mobile wave and I don’t think can invest fast enough to catch it. Intel has no advantage in the cloud. Intel graphics can’t compete with either nVIDIA nor AMD. Intel literally threw away its position in ARM processors and ARM is now Intel’s greatest threat — a threat I don’t believe it can beat now that the hyper-aggressive Mr. Son of Softbank owns ARM Holdings. So I predict Intel will this year spin-off its fab, following the example of AMD’s old fab, Global Foundries. This will appeal to investors and if Intel doesn’t think to do it we’ll shortly see activist investors do what they need to to make it happen. Better for Intel itself to do the dirty work, loading-up the fab with debt to finance the surviving company’s next stage of life. And I’m not saying this is a bad move for the fab, either, since it will be able to more freely pursue profitable merchant business. But for Intel it will be a jarring change and their path to success isn’t at all clear.
Prediction #5 — Apple makes a huge (for Apple) acquisition. Think for a moment about the Amazon Echo and Dot speakers and their very similar competitors from Google, Asus and others. Why didn’t Apple invent those products? Apple already had Siri, which defined the voice assistant and led the segment for years. What is Alexa but Siri’s sister? There is no reason at all why Apple shouldn’t have invented that product, yet they didn’t. This isn’t a tablet or a phone where Apple could enter the market late and snatch leadership through superior design: Apple had the lead and let it slip away. Apple is in trouble.
There are two things enormous companies can do in this situation — they can fire the CEO or the CEO can do a huge acquisition that will be spun as changing the whole character of the business. The best example of this behavior is actually Apple, itself, circa 1996, when Gil Amelio, attempting to keep his job, acquired NeXT for $425 million, which was a lot of money for Apple at the time. That it led to Gil’s own demise at the hands of Steve Jobs doesn’t matter: the point of the acquisition was to change the character of Apple, which it obviously did.
Tim Cook isn’t going anywhere so a big acquisition it will be. Apple doesn’t make really big acquisitions, but it has to be bigger than Beats, Apple’s largest acquisition to date. The acquisition could be almost anything (I’m not sure it really matters) but a high margin business is better and Apple’s recent success in services suggests it will be something in that direction. Apple’s lack of leadership in the cloud, mentioned in an earlier prediction, may mean they’ll use this one to bolster their cloud cred. I can think of a couple very bold possibilities in the $5-10 billion range, but don’t feel comfortable naming names at this point. The point is to either change the world (again) or at least appear to be changing it. I just hope they don’t buy Tesla.
Prediction #6 — Come-to-Jesus time for IBM. The most important 2017 event for IBM will be the retirement at 60 of CEO Ginni Rometty. The future of Big Blue absolutely depends on the actions this year of her successor. If she follows the example of the two previous IBM CEOs Rometty will stick around for a year as chairman before flying-off to paradise in her jet.
The reason I call this a Come-to-Jesus time for IBM is because the next CEO will have a chance to do something different with the company. If he or she decides to break with the past IBM has a chance. If the new CEO takes whatever game plan Rometty hands over and runs with that, then IBM is doomed.
Rometty was handed a bad plan by Sam Palmisano, loyally tried to make it work for two years and then has been improvising poorly ever since. She should have used her mandate and changed the plan immediately. Mandates don’t last.
This is very tough for the incoming CEO. IBM’s current plan isn’t working and isn’t sustainable. You can only eat your seed corn for a short time before future harvests are compromised. IBM can only sell divisions and borrow to buy back shares and raise the dividend in the absence of real revenue for so long. Interest rates are rising and the dollar is strong, both of which are bad for this strategy. The right CEO will realize this and will break with Rometty’s plan even as she remains as chairman. If they wait a year for Rometty to depart, it will be too late.
So it could mean a bloodbath in the executive suite at IBM. Except it probably won’t. I believe the company has lost its heart. That’s still a Come-to-Jesus moment except in this case Jesus won’t be there.
Apple buys IBM’s cloud business?
there’s a classic waste of money. sorry, but it’s too tightly held by the cojones by the big iron division.
Apple buys IBM?
Ick. No way for about a dozen reasons: Apple does things well and IBM does not. Apple does consumer and IBM does not. Apple does not do business, IBM Cloud is too closely tied to its own hardware business.
The only way this makes any sense is for IP and I can’t see buying the whole cow being cheaper than just buying milk.
Apple buying IBM is an interesting possibility. Picture Watson processing data from iOS’s HealthKit and CareKit (which get fed from 2nd and future generation Apple watches) and sending diagnostics back down to the phone or tablet to let them know when their readings combined with their history indicate a problem and that they should make their way to a doctor or clinic. Or, picture that same conversation with pictures of skin conditions or injuries with deep-learning-based image processing to augment the readings it gets from HealthKit.
I’m waiting for the tricorder: “referring to the device’s primary functions: sensing, computing, and recording” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder
Tricorder X Prize winners will be announced Q2 2017
http://tricorder.xprize.org/
Apple buys IBM is correct…when the time is right and the stock finds its nadir this year….$140 is my estimate so the price paid by Apple using 20% premium would be $170. $170 X 950M shares is about $160B.
Apple has no enterprise presence to speak of and IBM can’t get out of their own way to scale down to small businesses and consumers. Not a bad match.
As a tech news consumer, I thought big data (and “AI” ), and robotics would get a prediction. No comment?
I could have gone there, sure, but my predictions would have been to wait for 2018. One thing I have learned over my years of doing this is that change takes longer — often FAR longer — than you think it should. There are too many pieces still to be put in place for AI. As for Big Data, well I published 10,000 words on that a few months ago that I thought had it pretty well covered for now. It’s going to change the world of course, but not notably before 2018, if then.
I predict the same goes for buffer bloat and IPTV, speaking of which, what is the so-called solution to buffer bloat?
As I understand it, the solution to bufferbloat is to make improvements in the operating software of network routers, particularly the low cost ones used in homes and small businesses. There’s a project addressing it with research funding, mailing lists, sessions at industry conferences etc. See https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/
I think it’s telling that there are no headline articles in the news or on the bufferbloat website, claiming that the solution exists. Of course, if you eliminate buffering you eliminate its bloat problem as well. The real solution is to maximize buffering by downloading before playback as done by cable TiVo and VCRs before that.
All the open router firmwares have been quietly implementing solutions for the last few years. Nowadays these firmwares form the basis of almost all home routers (because they’re cheap, and they work, not because any desire to solve problems like bufferbloat).
It was impossible to get anyone interested: way to technical and vague for consumers, irrelevant for most businesses, and router manufacturers’ solution for a bad connection is to sell you more stuff.
I agree Robert. I thought OLED screens would have been here five years ago when I saw them demonstrated at a one of the early 2000’s CES shows. Also we’ve been waiting on multicast IPTV but that seems to be vaporware too.
I’ve more or less given up on ever seeing an electric car or fuel cell vehicle that I’d actually want to buy. Battery tech is still extremely behind the curve of where it should be. We haven’t progressed much since the late 90’s Lithium Ion technology and there’s no hydrogen fuel delivery system either much less production or low cost fuel cell designs despite Honda’s work on the FCX Clarity.
The extent of AI in the market is the Amazon Echo. Its main goal is to build a viable user interface based on voice.
Annual predictions means annual predictions feet to the fire time…
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>”both Microsoft and Apple would hit walls in 2016. I’d say there is no doubt that Apple hit something like a wall”
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“Something like,” with no specificity, and nothing happened like *anything* you claimed in your 2016 prediction:
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>”Apple, a company that appears from the outside to be entering a management crisis … it wouldn’t surprise me if Cook gave up his CEO job this year, moved to chairman, and let someone else worry about Apple day-to-day. … More likely, though, we’ll see 2016 as a year when Apple responds to this growth challenge not through new products or cutting costs but through financial engineering. … for Apple 2016 is likely to be a year of [financial] shenanigans…”
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NONE of that happened. At best you get only fractional credit for “while waiting for new products that will actually come in 2017.”
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Even most of what you wrote about Microsoft in that prediction didn’t happen: “If there’s a prediction here it is that Windows Phone will die in 2016 … at some point they probably expect to start charging for Windows 10. My gut says that won’t work well enough to fit Microsoft’s business plan, which means a crisis will ensue.”
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Windows 10 Mobile (Windows Phone was renamed to this in *2015*, so no partial points for even claiming the brand name would die in 2016) is still (somehow) alive, and at least to me Microsoft didn’t appear to be acting as if they were in a crisis in 2016.
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I don’t think you can claim credit on these.
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Further, “beginning of the end” predictions are just wishy-washy. When was the “beginning of the end” of horses and carts vs automobiles? Was 2016 the “beginning of the end” of human-driven cars vs. self-driving ones? Or was it 2015, or 2014, or…? Google’s self-driving car project has been going on since 2009. Was that the year? No one won the first DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004, but 5 vehicles managed to complete it in 2005. Was *that* the “beginning of the end” of human-driven cars???
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So what, *specifically*, marked “the beginning of the end for engineering workstations” in 2016? Everything you wrote about in that prediction already existed in 2015. So that year also might as well have been “the beginning of the end for engineering workstations.” Or maybe it was the year before that. Or…
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From where I sit, then, you only got 5 out of 10 definitively correct. 50%, not 90%. And one of those was “I predicted my Steve Jobs movie would return to Netflix.” Come on. That’s the predictions equivalent of insider trading.
So true. And the new predictions are also too easy. Cloud will be big next year? So what’s big? Isn’t it big now? Cable tv is already changing. There are no stats on bufferbloat. And IBM has been coming to jesus for years according to this very blog.
I’ll give a single reply to you both. It’s easy to be glib and criticize and harder to take a real position in opposition, which neither of you have done. I call them like I see them. If you’ll compare these predictions, which run to more then 2600 words, by the way, with any of the other tech pundits who do this stuff you’ll find I’ve said far more and given far greater details than those other guys ever do. So you think my predictions are, well, PREDICTABLE? Well of course they are. They are consistent with a world view I have presented here for nearly 20 years. For me to pull something out of my ass that doesn’t follow from what I’ve already written simply doesn’t make much sense to me. The point of these predictions in any case is to draw together any number of lines of thought from the precious year and show where they are headed in the new year. That’s all it is. That’s all it EVER is. And if I write something surprising it’s usually because the idea came from something else I wrote seven months ago that none of you remember. There’s no rocket science here but where you see a lack of substance I see the culmination of months of work.
What’s being asked for, in this case, is verifiability. Not of other tech pundit’s predictions, but of yours.
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I didn’t mention your other 2016 predictions because I didn’t need to. They were verifiable, and I give you credit on your assessments of them. (Well done to you on the ones you got correct.)
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And I’m not the one who called your predictions predictable. The ones I mentioned are just too vague to be counted as “correct” for the year in question. The specific details in those predictions, though, turned out to be not correct, as previously stated. So if the overall prediction is vague and unverifiable for the year in question, and your details of it are largely incorrect, then I count that as a “miss.”
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I’ve been reading your posts for years. I remember what you write, especially on the subjects I know well. That’s how and why it takes little effort for me to hold your feet to the fire every year. (Especially on your Apple predictions. I worked there too–several times, in fact, starting in the ’90’s. I know the internal culture well. I had an interview there a couple years ago after being gone for over a decade and it was so easy tell from just a few questions how much of the internal processes, procedures, and work culture hasn’t changed.)
Why are we reading you, if all you can do is predict what we’ve all seen for years? If you can’t provide some insight that isn’t obvious to everyone, what value do you have?
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I don’t say this to criticize. It’s just that nobody is interested in last year’s weather forecast.
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I think there is a huge market for a journalist who can go to trade shows, or talk to start ups and analyze what’s coming 12 months from now. You USED to do a little of that. But perhaps it’s a game for someone younger and hungrier. Old reruns of Steve Jobs are beyond stale. Soon we’ll be asking “Steve who”?
Acronym explanations?
Some of us aren’t in the same industry that you’ve been moving your columns towards, as you say. I had to look up “OTT” (Yeah, I know the expression “Over The Top”, going back to WW1, but that doesn’t mean I know what it means in a media environment). “fab” was another I don’t really know the meaning of in this context.
Fab, short for fabrication. In this case, the plants that actually produce the chips.
I believe I defined OTT in the first reference. Sorry about fab. Any others?
I guess with “OTT”/Over The Top, I just didn’t know what it meant in this context. During WW1, it was hardly something someone looked forward to. 🙂
What’s WW1?
I suppose that’s usually shown as WWI, for World War One.
New Marvel movie that’s coming out soon…
My first thought was World War 1, but doesn’t make sense in context “I know the expression “Over The Top”, going back to WW1” OTT didn’t become an expression until IPTV was added to a cable tv provider’s internet service, as opposed to using traditional tv channels that do not use an Internet protocol. If it’s an exaggeration, it would make more sense to say “going back to the beginning of time”.
Ordered to go “over the top” of your line’s trench … to be immediately met with murderous machine-gun fire.
…and a maturing Bob Cringely! 😀
Too true. I’ll be 64 this month.
> I’ll be 64
Youngster!
Ia64!
Ps very interesting post.
Now, feet to the fire for your 2017 predictions:
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“#1 — A Cloud Arms Race” – Isn’t this already going on? How do you define when it started? This is just like the “beginning of the end”-type predictions, which can be both claimed *and* disclaimed over quite a range of years. Speaking of which:
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“#3 — The Beginning of the End for U.S. Broadcast (and cable!!) Television” – Again, with what’s already been happening in 2016 with Netflix, Amazon streaming, etc. as well as OTT services from all or most of the existing majors, like HBO Now, it easily could be said that this “beginning of the end” has *already happened*.
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“#5 — Apple makes a huge (for Apple) acquisition” – Funnily enough, the biggest acquisition that Apple has made to date, Beats, wasn’t “predicted” at all by anyone until it was well in progress and insider info started leaking. Predicting that Apple is going to make a “huge acquisition” is always a bad bet. Of course you could always just repeat it every year and cross your fingers that it has to happen *eventually*… Like that Apple branded TV set that Gene Munster kept predicting. For years. Yeah. Well.
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Your reason for this prediction is flawed, too: “Apple is in trouble” with voice assistants. Well, there’s only two countries where Amazon’s Echo/Alexa is sold and officially works: The U.S. and the UK. Google’s Home and all the other company’s systems are just getting started. Now, there were indeed a number of 3rd party partners announced at CES to use Amazon’s Alexa in the near future, but there was *also* a big ramp up of 3rd party vendors announcing support for Apple’s HomeKit, which would all surely work immediately with any new Apple home voice assistant device/service.
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If or when Apple does such a system they’ll be able to sell it worldwide immediately, only limited by their ramp up of manufacturing and distribution. Their global sales would vastly eclipse Amazon’s and Google’s within months, weeks, or even just days. This *is* a market where Apple could enter late and snatch global leadership away from the dominant vendor. Just like with smartwatches and many other previous devices. (Also, don’t forget AirPods being the perfect mechanism to access an Apple home voice assitant service, from anywhere in or even nearby your house, like out in the yard.) And with that, everything else you wrote in that prediction falls apart. Regardless of the fact that being late to having a home voice assistant device is nowhere near a “fire the CEO or the CEO can do a huge acquisition that will be spun as changing the whole character of the business” level of thing anyways.
Dear Lun,
You are clearly far smarter than I am. In fact you remind me of a young man who wrote to me in 1999 explaining exactly how stupid I was and that he “ate people like you (meaning me) for lunch.” I knew I had to keep tabs on that guy who was then a senior at the University of Akron in Ohio. He still lives in Akron the last time I checked.
The reason I mentioned voice assistance wasn’t to claim that it is globally available, though I think it is pretty darned obvious that it ultimately WILL BE globally available. I mentioned it because here is a product category invented by Apple only to have them lose their market leadership, which as I explained is unusual for Cupertino. This is important – far more important than whether Amazon Echoes yet work in Norway.
And while it may not seem like a big deal that the U.S. government is completely abandoning standalone personal computers, I’d say that is hugely important to outfits like Dell, HP and Lenovo who make those boxes. Three years from today there won’t be a standalone PC in federal service, which is not to say that there won’t be devices but all federal applications will run in the cloud.
>”here is a product category [voice assistants] invented by Apple only to have them lose their market leadership, which as I explained is unusual for Cupertino”
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So what product categories did Apple actually invent? Not personal computers, or portable media players, or smartphones, or tablet computers, or smartwatches… They didn’t even invent voice assistants, they bought Siri from Siri Inc. One could say they invented keyboardless large screen multitouch smartphones, but if they ever had market leadership there they “lost” it fairly quickly (but not *profit* leadership!). I’d argue that your very premise here is flawed. What Apple tends to do is come out with *better* versions of things that are already out, but usually so far only taken up by early adopters, or in a niche market. The Mac was a *better* _personal_ computer (as opposed to a business/institutional microcomputer). The iPod was a *better* portable media player. The iMac was a *better* home Internet computer. The iPhone was a *better* smartphone. The iPad was a *better* tablet computer. The Apple Watch was a *better* smartwatch. AirPods are *better* wireless earphones.
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An easy parallel here is that Siri is the Apple II of voice assistants, and Amazon’s Alexa is (maybe!) the IBM PC of them. Apple IIs were fairly dominant early on thanks to VisiCalc, Apple’s cheap 5.25″ drives (compared to their competitors at the time), and the machine’s open, expandible architecture. Apple’s “Welcome, IBM. Seriously” full-page WSJ ad was evidence of this. Apple lost market dominance in PCs to IBM and PC compatibles, though, like they did with the iPhone to Android. And now it could be said that Amazon’s Echo/Alexa is “dominant” in the voice assistant category. (I’d argue it’s still very early days for this, however.)
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In reality, pretty much the only hardware product category for which Apple *did* manage to maintain dominance over the market in all measures was the iPod. So in that way that’s actually an *outlier*.
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In your previous reply you stated that it’s “harder to take a real position in opposition, which neither [you nor Reinier] have done.” Ok, then! I will indeed make a prediction in opposition, that Apple will *not* make a “huge” acquisition in 2017 in order to “[change] the whole character of the business.”
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I agree with you that your other option, a CEO departure (based on your “Apple is in trouble” premise) won’t happen. Going beyond that, I take a stand in opposition to your very premise of Apple being in trouble due to it being “behind” in voice assistants.
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Finally, I’ll go out on a precipice and predict that Apple will release their own home device with Siri integration in 2017 that could be considered Apple’s “answer” to Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home.
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My guess is that rather than something positioned specifically as a home voice assistant like Echo or Home, it’ll be positioned as a set of wirelessly connected stereo speakers with Siri integration. A “W”-series chip like the W1 in the AirPods will be included, and there will be one or more similar sets of speakers with a “W” chip and Siri integration available from Apple’s Beats brand around the same time (addressing ranges of portability, color, style, and price points). In fact these speakers may only come out as Beats products, but I’d think Apple would like to have a single model of them availale under the Apple brand itself. A name I could imagine for Apple’s version would be AirSpeakers, though that name, or variants, has already been used (Logitech has an Air Speaker product, and there’s an air-speakers.com domain that doesn’t appear to be functional, right now. Hey, maybe Apple bought them out!)
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I’m not going to predict that Apple will “take over the market” for home voice assistants with this, but it’s at least something that “keeps them in the game,” much like Apple Maps vs Google Maps, iCloud vs Dropbox/Google/etc., iWork vs MS Office, and so on. And it’ll blunt the pundit talk of Apple being jumped and left far behind in the home voice assistant category.
One problem, Apple didn’t develop Siri, Nuance did(and perhaps Alexa as well). Nuance was reportedly being bought by Samsung a few years ago. Does Apple still have the flexibility to do all this?
I’m surprised you didn’t just come right out and say, this wouldn’t have happened if Steve was still around.
Ah, one more thing:
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>”I think PCs are going to disappear completely from government, thanks to Edward Snowden, starting in 2017. I suppose that could have been a prediction.”
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Well, apart from that “…starting in 2017” wiggle (does government use iPads and smartphones? Yes? Oooh, it’s already started!), one could humorously predict that a significant portion of U.S. government business will *move to Twitter*, and any administration staff or employees who don’t use Twitter and follow Trump on it will quickly find themselves out of the loop and maybe out of a job! So yeah, you don’t really need a full desktop or laptop computer just to use Twitter… 😉
Your Twitter prediction assumes Twitter will still be solvent and a viable company this year…. It wouldn’t be a bad prediction to declare 2017 the year Twitter dies. Obama famously used a Blackberry and by my account that didn’t exactly save the company…
If Yahoo has been able to still exist for this long given what it’s gone through, Twitter’s going to still exist (either independently or finally acquired) in some form or another for some time to come, as well.
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And last I checked, Blackberry’s actually still around, too. 🙂
Intel sell it’s fabs?
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It’s an interesting idea, but Intel relies upon a close tie between its products and its fabs. Technology that goes in to the processors is unique, and they’re ahead for lithography. I don’t see them wanting to give up that advantage in a hurry.
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Intel also bought out Altera, the FPGA company. This is really significant as once Altera parts are run through the same fabs as the I-Core processors they’ve instantly got an advantage over other FPGA companies. This is Intel moving more in to embedded design.
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Furthering the embedded design, think again about ARM. If Intel bundled their own ARM processor, that had been through their leading fabs, using the same technologies as their I-Core processors, where would they be? Selling this onwards to the likes of Apple for their next generation of iPads and iPhones. Intel could make a lot more from the ARM processor than ARM does through their licenses.
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ARM licence model works as there an effective no-competition clause. You’re not trying to license from someone who’s also a competitor. The new owner might want to change that, but he’d be going from having hundreds of partners to having hundreds of competitors.
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So really Intel would be best to keep moving further and further towards embedded systems and using their superior fabs as their unique selling advantage.
Great points but meaningless in the face of activist investors. I’m not saying this makes product sense, technical sense, or even business sense, but it does make WALL STREET SENSE, which some think is nonsense.
Robert,
Wall Street is an area that I haven’t got enough experience of! I take your point on the nuisance investors.
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Often I see shares as being like trading cards, where they take on their own intrinsic value that’s unrelated to their earnings. Certainly if you look at the sale of ARM recently the profitability of the company vs purchase price is huge. It would take 40+ years for it to earn back what was paid for it!
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40 years is a long time for a technology company.
big buy for Apple? cloud, you say? toss one name out, CenturyLink, at $13 billion a little over your guess, but there is cloud, local internet, video, and with the buy of Level3 in progress, pretty close to the biggest international pipes around. got to be time for a big PC refresh, too.
Apple buys Sears, opens 500 giant Apple stores.
cheaper in Chapter 7 for this one
There is no reason why Apple would buy CenturyLink at this point. When speaking of cloud services I’d suggest Apple would be looking for something very profitable and showy they can do with their existing data centers. Think higher in the application stack.
My pick is dropbox.
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iCloud file synching on the PC is crap and I personally don’t trust it but Dropbox just works like apple products of old.
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Still a big change in file management on iOS devices would be needed, well overdue in my mind.
Or Netflix, a big showy move, some good technology, 30% profit margin.
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But at 60 billion might be 5 years to late, unless they can some of that overseas money of course.
First on the list of FAILED predictions: Mineservers will ship for Christmas 2015.
Touché. More on that in a few days.
We’re waiting… and have been, since Sept. 2015.
How many weeks equals a few days?
Please execute the Mineserver deliveries and/or a status communication soon. Please?
With all due respect, it has been a long time with no information for your backers.
A few days? Two weeks?
Fake timelines?
Alternative promises?
I’ve been seeing these MineCraft Server comments for months while following Cringely’s blog and thought to myself “go whine somewhere else. Kickstarters take awhile, give Cringely a break!”
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Then today I had some time to kill and saw another comment and said “what the hey” and checked out the Kickstarter site, reading the epic tale [or lack thereof] from beginning to end. I have no stake in the project but oh my goodness has Cringely failed you all on nearly every level; I understand your frustration now, as there is a complete and utter lack of communication from Cringely despite the crowds stating that is simply all they want! There are about 10 “active” backers out of the 388 that backed the project and I’m pretty sure the other 378 have given up on Cringely and the project all together.
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For those of you who think these individuals are just trolling Cringely and his blog, know that their claims and arguments are valid. Cringely owes them a product and an apology, but above all, he just owes them the smallest fraction of his time to let them know what is going on! To you loyal supporters, I both pity and support you in your bleak and likely fruitless quest. Godspeed!
Apple should acquire Moley Robotics (https://www.moley.com). Talk about a HUGE consumer market just waiting to pop – a personal robotic chef. Everyone’s got to eat, right? How cool would it be to pull up a nearly unlimited number of recipes, and have a robot make it for you (and clean up afterwards)! If you were on a special diet, or just dieting for that matter, it could make your personalized meals.
I love that idea but Apple won’t. Not Invented Here (NIH). And ultimately competing with appliance makers doesn’t have high enough margins.
Apple already has giant data centers. I was thinking Rackspace. They need to spend billions. Anything less won’t get noticed by the press. IBM is too old school. The cultures would never integrate. Plus it needs to scare Alphabet and AWS. Nothing smaller will cause them to look over their shoulder.
Maybe HP enterprise and IBM will join in the cloud. The theory is if you tie two rocks together, maybe they will float.
Intel selling the fab is the startling one. Is the fab culture too ingrained, too much part of who they are to part with the fab? I think it is. A leopard can’t change it’s spots. It would make a new and different company. What would the “not a fab” part even sell? Just do design of x86 processors.
What about everything else Intel? They make SSD, memory, peripheral parts, and all sorts of random stuff we would never imagine. What happens to all that stuff?
Rackspace is too small to compete and really brings nothing to Apple it couldn’t create internally. No, it has to be some really strategic IP that disrupts the business models of other major players. I don’t see Apple buying infrastructure. As for Intel, yes it is shocking because it won’t be Intel’s idea, it will be Carl Icahn’s.
I predict that Cringely will continue to not only deliver on his ready-to-ship-by-christmas-2015 Mineservers but that he will also continue to ignore the people whose money he has been sitting on for over a year.
I hope I’m wrong.
(But I doubt it.)
I go along with the theory that the next thing that will be heard from the Mineserver project is when his kids use it as a brag point on their college applications. They can then use their dad’s blog postings about the “successful kickstarter project” as evidence.
Yep, That’ll be it. And the admissions folks will look at the campaign page, see that it’s there (with their pictures, no less!) and figure it was successful. Even though it wasn’t.
Of course, if I were king of the world, I’d make sure that every admissions person that looks at their application was a Mineserver backer…
As I wrote, more on that in a few days.
How many weeks in “a few days”? The last promised WEEKLY update on the project was on 10-Nov. At this point, any update other than all shipments have been made will be suspect.
When do you plan to start answering the technical questions that multiple people have been asking about the project:
How long do you expect the batteries to last in the units since they are in a case that was glued shut over one year ago?
How does the code on each unit get updated, since I’m sure you missed something?
How long until you get bored with the project and shut off the dynamic DNS or some other cloud service that is required for the units to operate?
Can you please leave some Minesever Feedback on your Kickstarter page? It is a pain searching through Cringely Comments to know you are still working on the project. There has been no information from you or your Kids on the Kickstarter page since early November. If Jason is referring to Mineserver Backers as Trolls, this is the only forum we think Cringely reads our comments. If that makes us Trolls, so be it.
@Scott – Nope, I’m referring to pedantry about the predictions. It’s supposed to be good fun. I don’t have a dog in the minesweeper server thing. But I am curious to see how it turns out.
“As I wrote, more on that in a few days.” As in, “I already told you, I’ll tell you more in a few days, so quit your whining and get over yourself.”
Well, it’s been a “few days” — 9, actually — and…. *crickets*
So do you perhaps understand why we don’t instantly believe you, let alone give you the benefit of the doubt?
No one’s looking for the great American novel — just an update letting folks know what’s up. Remember those folks? The backers? The ones whose money you’ve been sitting on for a year and a half?
Yeah.
About IBM the Cloud growth will strictly depend upon the success of the Watson brand. Watson has all the right ingredients to disrupt the market or create a new one. I bet also that IBM will change its Go To Market and Communication strategy using Watson popularity as Trojan horse to new markets never explored before. If Watson fails then I agree IBM is doomed.
Watson is a brand and a technology but not a product. Above all Watson isn’t scalable because it was never intended to be. Watson is a prototyping system designed to generate consulting hours for IBM. Name a Watson customer that is using this nine year-old “product” to run their daily business with thousands of customers. I can’t. Prototype in Watson then deploy in Hadoop, which brings close to zero revenue to IBM — NOT a strategy for success.
There is no need for Watson to be scalable simply because it is a Cloud offering so it will take advantage of the scalability of the underline Softlayer cloud infrastructure. Watson at the end is simply a set of APIs that can be integrated within every application via Bluemix, the more you consume Watson and the more you are good to “train” it with YOUR internal data set (Watson is not like Siri or Cortana and doesn’t take data from internet) the highests will be the benefit. IBM goal is simply to make Watson a consumable product that has the potential to reach virtually any market even those not exploratd by IBM before. The more application will integrate its APIs the more money IBM will make and the more will be its Softlayer infrastructure usage.
Them, it is true that the technology is 9 years old but is has became a consumable product only in the past couple of years. Before it has been a very nich and still R&D technology.
One thing with cable companies is that I’m surprised they haven’t started offering Roku type services via their set top devices. They make a lot of rent off those devices and they could extend it further.
doesn’t Comcast do that with xfinity service?
They have put Netflix programs in their Payperview.
I have some minor critiques and questions:
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1. There are several reasons ubiquitous cloud services won’t be ready for prime time anytime soon: a) SAAS applications are SLOW – exacerbated by VPN and internet capacity issues (maybe the bufferbloat thing will fix this?). b) would you write code for hours on end using a cell phone, or an ipad? I’ll be interested to see what happens on the joint health front in 20 years. c) developers are just starting to realize they need to rewrite their code more efficiently. With cloud, you have additional layers of processing that take place for every interaction or virtual CPU clock tick, and routing of packets over virtual infrastructure. So far I just see bloat-ware being repackaged for the cloud – which is another component of the slowdown users experience. This will continue to be a significant performance issue for anything that requires near-real-time and interactive use.
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3. OTT with regards to Net Neutrality rollback – do you have any idea what impact this will have on the little guy who provides OTT services? I could imagine forcing some free or small business services off the network if prices are too high.
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Thanks.
If SAAS doesn’t work fast enough it won’t succeed, just as you say. But we are in the early days of SAAS optimization and the deployment models are still evolving. Plus there are circumstances that will lead some customers to simply demand (and pay for) acceptable performance, no matter how much it costs, and those extravagant solutions will ultimately benefit everyone. The whole point of my prediction in this case is that we are just months away from a tipping point after which there will be no going back for the larger market.
I am feeling almost as positive as bob is about finally beating bufferbloat – it just took 3 years longer than I thought it would. But we’ve long had (since 2012) the ability to fix it in end-user routers (nearly every 3rd party firmware has support for fq_codel and smart queue management (aqm), including not just linux but now bsd based gear. It’s essentially impossible to not have the ability to fix it in modern OS firmware, now. Multiple parties call the solution what it is (edgerouter, evenroute, openwrt/lede) others give it a fancy name (adaptive qos, dynamic qos)….
Recently we moved onto fixing wifi, that work is now complete ( https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/ ) and moving “out there” far more rapidly than I could have imagined (on two chipsets out of thousands), so I figure a goodly percentage of new consumer routers sold by middle of next year will have wifi working well at all rates.
And we’re seeing signs that smaller ISPs are getting it. We’ll see even more movement above the green line this year.
https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/results/bufferbloat?up=1
Still… I’m pessimistic about the bigger ISPs and their much longer supply chains. The day where their default supplied to the user, equipment is lag-free seems a year or three away. Maybe – as bob says – the end of NN will lead to more investment in fixing bufferbloat, but I daren’t hold my breath.
As for LTE… sigh. No visible progress yet.
Still: Happy (bloat-free) New Year!
I think Bob buried a lede in this prediction; the end of Bufferbloat will mean the widespread adoption of open source firmware in the home router/network appliance market. I’m already seeing WiFi router vendors use their support of open source firmware as a selling feature (lookin’ at you, Linksys!) and with the FTC fining D-Link for weak security, it’s probably the beginning of the end for proprietary home router firmware.
btw, I tend to think industry-wide fixes for bufferbloat are essential to moving more services into the cloud. Jitter and latency really hurts interactivity. So it’s interrelated even further than the above.
My own take on apple’s slowness and distraction is due to the construction of their new HQ – similar construction which essentially killed Borland many years ago. I don’t expect that to stop being distracting this year. Also, they have so much money overseas, America is a saturated market in many respects – why should they buy a company here?
Intel’s cpu performance improvements are negligible and will remain so for the foreseeable future, 🙁 – but their new flash-like technology looks very impressive. Their video chips and drivers and ethernet are first rate however – the markets that nvidia/ati pursue are higher end gamers – Intel’s video is “good enough” for most users. I hope that Intel will make available better tools (design software!) to utilize their FPGA co-processor designs in the coming year, as that is potentially another area of growth for them, sadly underutilized since they bought altera.
The processor in my PC is an Intel Core i5-4590.
Rats… it ate my earlier post… I feel like this year’s predictions is a light list and focuses too easily on the usual suspects.
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What are the VCs saying? What will China buy? What will our next President’s policies produce? What will the UK,Google, Ford or Uber do? What lame thing will Apple buy next? What will the next move in the inevitable consolidation of the entertainment-provider or entertainment-creation category look like? Why is (intelligent notifications / smart homes / digital assistants ) such a tough nut to crack and who will break out this year with a new idea only to get aquihired (and their idea killed) within six months? Where’s the pie-in-the-sky predictions from years past that would be a “miss” if assessed in 365 days but a “hit” if assessed after a year or two?
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4 more predictions please.
Okay, I’ll do four more predictions. Give me a day or two.
Give the guy a break… He’s clearly super busy helping his kids finish their kickstarter project and keeping the backers up-to-date on their progress.
A day or two was a day or two (or three of four) ago. Just another case where he only publishes an update when he feels pressured to do so.
*Tumbleweed rolling through the empty streets*
Hey Bob, can you clarify your comment on Apple not buying Tesla? Why not, and who wins that deal?
Elon Musk is a force of nature but he’s not an especially good business person. In one sense this is what makes him so interesting, but if he weren’t the luckiest man on Earth he would have failed long ago. Apple buying Tesla would be 1996 all over again with Elon as Steve Jobs. Only Elon ISN’T Steve Jobs and the result, while fun to watch, would probably not be good. Apple needs a new $20 billion business that pushes its gross margins UP not down and that’s not Tesla.
Apple also buys in one of two categories:
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* Stuff that makes sense to the “I shop at Target, NOT Walmart.” American (and aspire-to-be-American) crowds – people who have been trained to pay a little more thinking they’re getting a little better. Think Macs (better) and Beats headphones (crap but well-marketed). Tesla is still out of reach for many. If Apple were to buy a car company, it might have been VW if it weren’t for the recent scandal (though it may not want Audi or Porsche). Not a lot of flashy, well-marketed ubiquitous categories left for it to buy into – it’s either been there/done that or killed the category. Harman Kardon’s purchase by Samsung might have been a great pre-emptive move. They’re running out of categories – they might have to look at a Netflix or a Hulu but they’re already walking a fine line with the content providers that becoming one themselves might be a shot in the foot.
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* Acqui-hires – small outfits whose technology might or might not become part of the invisible back-end. Cringley would know better than I if there are any out there worth buying. Problem is that they’re all small purchases and often the hires don’t stick around.
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Perhaps they need to go the route of Yahoo! (like you predicted, Robert) and start doing some VC work themselves. Or else buy a small failing country and build a few factories for the steady hungry workforce.
Actually of all the car companies Porsche is the one Apple would covet the most. 15% profit margins!
https://www.autonews.com/article/20160404/OEM/304049938/porsche-says-industry-best-15-percent-margin-a-sacred-cow
Now just to put that into perspective – Apple has had an average margin of about 40% percent over the past 5 years.
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/01/28/apple-incs-gross-margin-just-surpassed-40.aspx
And GM has averaged about 10% margin over the past 5 years.
The car business is no place for Apple – and they’ve realized this as project Titan is slowly being either wound down or re-directed.
“Prediction #3 — The Beginning of the End for U.S. Broadcast (and cable!!) Television”
Personal economics drives this more than anything IMHO… During down economic times who wants to pay $100/month for a bloated TV package? You can receive HD bits over the air and store them on the PC using a HDHomeRun tuner and Kodi – This is free and doesn’t require a high-end Comcast package. However, once you need to add more than two or three one-off services (Netflix, HBO Now, Sling TV) you have a couple of problems: (1) soon cost is back up to that expensive TV package and if the economics don’t matter at that point (2) the UI sucks because the burden is on you to remember what program is on app X, so the cable box starts to look attractive again…
Tivo has a $300 box with no monthly fee for antenna viewing.
Unfortunately, antenna viewing is worth what you pay for it. I need the non-premium cable channels for those parts of the year when broadcast sucks. YMMV. It’s not about having 400 channels, but having a few dozen good ones from which to choose.
Prediction 1 – cloud adoption kills corporate data centers, no net new construction. AWS, MS, Google in that order but mostly AWS. IBM bleeds blue and Oracle eats installed base but can claim net gain in cloud adoption.
Prediction 2 – Intel creates cloud server division. That’s where the growth is and they better keep it all running on Intel or else it’s curtains.
Prediction 3 – Apple does VR right. It will be cool and everyone will want it for Christmas 2017.
Prediction 4 – Terrorists launch physical attack against one or more cloud data centers. Less than a couple dozen people killed but 1000’s of corporations affected. Simultaneous cyber-attack cripples remaining IT infrastructure for weeks. US GDP shows significant decline after incident.
Prediction 5 – Trump tries to tweet about US response to prediction 4 but Twitter is down…sad. No one reads newspapers anymore so fake news sites spread rumors of zombie apocalypse.
Prediction 6 – Gun sales increase…
What Apple or some other super tech firm needs to create is a security system that —
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1. Actually protects data from being hacked.
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2. Tracks the intrusion back to the source so the hacker can be arrested or otherwise obliterated.
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3. Is so simple to maintain that even government bureaucrats, corporate officers, or small business owners could use it.
Regarding #4, Intel: what about their mobile radio chipset business? Can this “save” them, i.e. open doors into mobile devices they closed themselves more than a decade ago by abandoning (strong)ARM and later XScale?
They are competing against “Qualcommzilla” here. At least part of the current iPhones have the Intel-made modems (based on Infineon technology Intel bought years ago, used in the original 2007 iPhone and up to iPhone 4, before Qualcomm parts took over).
Maybe Intel should buy Qualcomm? 😉 Apple not being interested since chipset is not visible to users…
The next IBM CEO in line is supposed to be Rosamilia… though with Ginni the Eagle anything is possible and she might just pick another woman who has no vision at all. I agree with you that unless the next CEO is a real star IBM will die. Even a guy like Rosamilia may not be the right fit. IBM needs an outsider as its next CEO.
IBM will never die. It will just pull back the curtains on becoming a leading patent troll in 2017 (2018?). IBM PR recently announced that the company filed 8,088 patents in 2016 (and 24 years of leadership in patent filings!). Product lines will be continued to be sold off or closed down but the research group continues to write and file patents in droves and IBM lawyers will begin looking for victims to sue. Or patents will be sold in large batches to Apple, Google, Microsoft so they can protect themselves from patent trolls. Wall street will eat up this business model (researchers and lawyers is all you need!) and the CEO will discuss revenue from patents initially as a final strong revenue generator at the end of each earnings call but over time it becomes the core business. Quarterly earnings calls will eventually start with how many patents have been filed that quarter and how revenue from patents in the last 4-6 quarters are generating revenues.
Hi Bob.
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I enjoy the megatrending what-if pondering. Too bad about the pendants (trolls). Curious that you’re replying (more than usual).
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I’m still pondering the successor to NerdTV (style, content, format). Especially the notion of posting all the source footage for anyone to edit, reuse as they wish. Still a great idea.
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I once predicted someone would add paragraph spacing to your site’s CSS. I continue to be wrong. (ducks)
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Cheers, Jason
First with Alexa. Alexa had a scene in one Mr. Robot that made it cool and drove sales. Without that promotion, my guess would be that it would have sold less than 10,000 units. One of my kids bought me one for Christmas. It was fun at New Years getting the times in various cities around the world. But, true to the examples here, Alexa said “huh?” to many non-standard city names, especially cities in Asia. It knows Singapore, but has no clue about Salina, KS and Celina, TX. The WestWorld TV show is showing “AI” to a lot of folks in it’s own “sentient” and somewhat dysfunctional way. At the end of the day, AI is just programming and data to find “context”. No real thought there but some clever (and some dumb) programming in the new fast processors we have with lots of storage to waste. Alexa works better than Siri at our house because my son has set up my wife’s place of work for traffic, his Pizza default order, and our home address for the weather. At the end of the day, it is not terribly sophisticated and even quite dumb without you giving it a lot of context information about youself. I think it’s just another Trojan horse to get you to reveal info about yourself for marketers to exploit. Other than speech recognition or pattern matching, what really is AI? I assume we are decades or centuries away from sentient computers? I think we are being sold a bill of goods on “smart” or “cognitive” this or that, just marketing to make us believe and buy. The next collapse is when American consumers, after having been laid off from good paying full-time jobs for the gig economy, run out of credit and go back to basics, all while thousands of everything that no one can afford gets made in automated factories with automated distribution. As for Siri, it just gets in the way of Apple Pay, so I turn it off. And fix the unlock feature in the new iOS, it is annoying to press twice.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a post on why you think PCs are going to disappear completely from government, starting in 2017.The ‘thanks to Snowden’ part makes sense, but I’m not sure the timetable makes sense. I’m a federal employee and we’re just finishing our switch from desktops to laptops. Our technology adoption is slow because of cost, policy, and inertia. In addition, we (still) have a noticeable percentage of decision-makers who distrust computer technology in general and mobile technology in particular.
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Now, if you’re predicting that desktop applications are going to start disappearing then you could be correct (depending on what your threshold for “disappearing” is). Thanks for your predictions and other posts.
Re: “I’m a federal employee…we (still) have a noticeable percentage of decision-makers who distrust computer technology in general and mobile technology in particular.” Good to know there’s still some wisdom in government.
I’m wondering about the Man from Akron, Ohio; odd that Mr. Cringely would continue to keep tabs on him for what was presumably a trash talking email, the question remains where is he? RC wrote “the last he checked”, this could have been years ago, perhaps the Man from Akron is a billionaire living in Vegas or the appropriate geographic location that would satisfy RC in the context of eating his lunch.
More questions remain, can somebody be smarter than Mr. R. Cringely while eating his proverbial lunch but maintain a residence in Akron, Ohio?
Or RC hired a PI and Mr./Mrs. PI revealed that the Man from Akron was employed in a working class sector of the Rust Belt, OK but still his IQ could be higher than Mr. Cringely and maybe his definition of eating Bob’s lunch is different than Bob’s but once again…
Why in God’s name would Bob or Robert Cringely keep tabs on this Man from Akron, well we know one thing is certain, the Man is not Lebron James or maybe it is, after all he still lives in Akron and he can’t give out snake oil like generalistic New Year’s Eve predictions like RC, RC over LJ?
I was thinking about what would happen with media but I came to a different conclusion than you. (My background is more in film than tv.) It used to be each company had an identity, going back to the studios. You have some identity with the cable networks but it’s hard to know which company they’re owned by.
It seems in a world with any number of channels they will need an identity. The weaker channels can’t survive on their own. They’ll have to sell some type of package, following Netflix. CBS joined Hulu so that seems to undermine my prediction, but this is not resolved.
The issue of content is forgotten in Silicon Valley. They’ve stolen content for years. It’s like you described IBM. There’s not much left to steal. The newspapers are nearly trashed. Following this Disney would be a good company for Apple to buy.
Not sure why you thought Apple would go after Warner. (In the old days Disney was for families and Warner was more adult, they made gangster movies.) Disney includes Pixar, which was owned by Jobs. Disney would be expensive but would transition Apple away from iPhones and China.
This could be compared to AOL Warner, but Apple is not AOL. The idea is similar. AOL tried to merge tech with media and failed, but it seems like it needs to happen. Otherwise all you have left is YouTube where media is amateurish. You saw the problems with this in the recent election.
With Disney under its control Apple would have a large media ecosystem, sort of like AOL but much bigger. People would buy their phones and watch their movies and tv shows through the phones. Little girls would grow up thinking Apple Disney is wonderful. Because Disney is childlike it has worldwide appeal. Animation is easily dubbed and the characters often could be whatever race you imagine.
[…] is an astute commentator not only on technology but on the business of technology Take a few minutes for his two page analysis of what lies ahead . Required reading for those who need to know what will be happening in the turbulent world of IT. […]
Having used the cloud platforms of all three big vendors (Microsoft, Google and Amazon), as an engineer I am not impressed. Microsoft’s solutions feel like Docker containers for Windows while Amazon’s feel like I’m working on Big Iron albeit with some distributed magic hidden away and Google’s… well that just feels like they bought a half dozen companies mashed them together with some primary colored branding but it is not a platform. I know you have moved to an investor focus but it feels like the market is ready for better things. I don’t disagree that computation should be getting cheaper due to more GPUs in the racks but it is not reflected in my bills, it is not reflected in my clients bills and it is not reflected in the time to develop. So maybe you could enlighten me as to whether the investors are going to be looking at only customer numbers (which I suspect will hit a saturation point possibly as soon as 2018 but more realistically 2020) Or are they going to push the big three to do better?
Re: “Having used the cloud platforms of all three big vendors…” Is there any cloud vendor or platform, big or small, with which you’re satisfied? I have a theory that the common problem is the cloud itself.
Now, if you’re predicting that desktop applications are going to start disappearing then you could be correct (depending on what your threshold for “disappearing” is). Thanks for your predictions and other posts.
Wow, people come here are investors….. APPLE AND MICROSOFT WILL HIT A WALL IN 2016 !
Apple. 1-8-16 $ 96.96 1-16 -17 119.09
MS 1-8 -16 52.33 1-16-17 62.70
WELCOME TO BOBS WALL ! Either urine in or your not !
Here’s a good reason for Apple to buy DIsh–
Apple dropped the ball on music streaming, but was able to get in the game and recover because of its relationship and clout with the music industry.
Apple again dropped the ball with OTT video streaming, and tried and failed to get its own service off the ground, likely due to hubris, probably on the part of both it, and the TV industry. Apple has no clout in this situation, so it’s either going to have to suck it up, and agree to the TV industry’s terms, or buy an existing service, like SlingTV via Dish.
With Dish (SlingTV), Sony (Vue), AT&T (DirecTV Now), Google (YouTube Red), and Hulu all either in the game, or preparing to enter, can Apple afford to sit on the sideline and lose out on an entire line of business, as well really provide a compelling reason for users to buy AppleTVs?
Producing a few lame reality shows, and tossing them onto Apple Music isn’t going to cut it.
I’d say that Apple doesn’t do generic products because they’d be subject to price competition. That’s why I’d be very surprised if they started making TVs or cars or smart light bulbs, for that matter. It’s also why I would be surprised if they became an ISP.
With Apple cult following, a well designed Apple TV that normally sells for $4k could be sold by Apple for $6k.
I meant the Apple TV media streamer boxes, now on their fourth generation, not televisions.
Even though it was once termed a “hobby,” it hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, even with the addition of iOS App Store support.
Amazon uses their Prime service to move their Fire TV hardware boxes. Apple could use an equivalent.
Yes, I knew what you meant by Apple TV. As I understand it, the only reason to buy an Apple TV is to play content purchased on iTunes, which is Apple TV’s non-competitive advantage. Streaming content is becoming generic/competitive, hence it’s a business Apple would choose to avoid.
Gotcha. Point taken, but that has to be counterbalanced by Apple’s stated desire to grow their services business. Moving hardware has always been its end game, but for now, there is little attraction to the ATV except for the iTunes store, and some would argue that’s not much of an attraction at all. If they offer some sort of OTT service, even at lower margins, they at least keep users in their ecosystem, and if they live up to their mantra of adding value or ease of use to an existing segment, then it can boost the ATV.
I’m a long time Apple user (but not in a fanatical way), and received an ATV 4 with the DTV Now promo. Aside from smoother integration with the iOS world, I’m hard pressed to think of anything that sets it apart from the Rokus, Fire TVs and Xiaomi boxes of the world.
It’s not a good business by Apple’s standards, but the company still felt the need to take on Pandora, Spotify, and the like with Music. I think TV is similar.
I predict that, in 2017, because visual contents are much more important, consumable and demanded nowadays, Cringely will start to publish videos. Possibly he will become a full-time Youtuber in 3 years.
super admin…
“Okay, I’ll do four more predictions. Give me a day or two” January 10
very good admin
2017 Predictions:
– Cringely makes his next four predictions in “a few days” aka April
– Mineserver ships weeks before the end of Trump’s presidency
How about a prediction on when you’re going to deliver those Minecraft servers?
There is obviously a bundle to know about this. I think you made certain nice points in features also.
This is something not often addressed with far reaching consequences from elections to h1b labour laws
The issues are no longer just tech but political
Tech at service of politics instead of tech to service society in a positive way
This is y we can no longer predict based on tech but predict based on politics, which is y predictions fail just based on tech
It’s a post 1984 society
State of Internet Censorship 2016 [33c3]
https://youtu.be/KUqcJ2AvaRE
It was a puzzle, but I figured it out: y=why new-line=period for previous line.
I just want to know will Apple update the Mac Pro and Mac Mini computers… in 2017
thanks admin.. apple update
Future prediction
https://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/snippets/massive-anti-trump-protests-bengaluru-plans-clamp-h1b-visas-19169
And trump ended tpp
Mean while we have protests on our streets while trump is defending amerucsn labour and interests for the first time in history, the democrats where giving computer jobs away to imported h1b Indians
More predictions
IBM is in trouble and desperate hype is apparently required.
http://wolfstreet.com/2017/01/23/big-shrink-to-hire-25000-in-the-us-as-layoffs-pile-up/
Here’s an alternative fact from AP: “Regular cable service, of course, is far from dead. Comcast reported growth in cable subscribers in 2016, the first annual gain in a decade, mostly because fewer customers are leaving. Its service bundles can be cheaper than paying Comcast for internet and getting TV elsewhere, its updated X1 cable box helps keep them on board and less expensive ‘skinny bundles’ with fewer channels appeal to customers turned off by cable’s expense.” http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CABLE_GOES_WIRELESS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-01-26-09-57-09
Late to the party here, but here is my prediction, for the record:
ISPs will start moving the last mile to wireless.
As described in the same AP article: “Before it gets to phones, however, 5G might provide an alternative for fast home internet. AT&T and Verizon are both testing ‘fixed wireless’ services for the home. Verizon has launched field tests in 10 areas around the country. AT&T says it will experiment with this home-internet option in Austin, Texas, for customers using its DirecTV Now internet-cable service. It also plans more 5G tests in the second half of the year.” http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CABLE_GOES_WIRELESS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-01-26-09-57-09
Resim Akademi Güzel Sanatlara Hazırlık Kursu ile sınavlara hazırlanan, yetenekli öğrencilerimiz, ülkemizdeki güzel sanatlar liselerinde eğitim almaya başlayarak kariyerlerine adım atabilirler. Güzel Sanatlar Liselerinin yetenek sınavlarına hazırlanan öğrenciler için Türkiye’de bulunan liseler ve kontenjanları… Devamı için, http://www.guzelsanatlarahazirlikkursu.com.tr/
Did you see the doc on Netflix about Sex Robots? Not that I don’t find them disturbing to behold but I believe they are going to take off in 2017. There may be some social impacts to that as well but that remains to be seen.
Aida: http://marvelcinematicuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Aida
Türkiye’nin En Çok Tercih Edilen Fotoğrafçılık Kursu Foto Life Akademi
Foto Life Akademi fotoğrafçılık kursu temel ve meslekli atölyeler, ders programı, eğitmen kadrosu, gezi programı ve fiyatları
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Wow! Great to find a post with such a clear meesgas!
What an article Bob. I just loves your work. wonderful.
Mark Hurd is gone from Oracle in 2017.
It’s about time someone wrote about this.
Tech predictions are always fun. I think one of the reasons for engineering workstations to still be around
could be the trend of co-working in common spaces and the anxiety over using cloud based storing. As for
your present year predictions, the end of broadcast television has definitely commenced and not only
that it has started to spread worldwide. As for Apple – who can never be left out in such predictions – it
does need a game changer and fast and a big acquisition might just do the trick. What will it be though?
Ya learn something new everyday. It’s true I guess!