Update January 2, 2014 — My Mom died last night, cleverly extending at least her financial existence into another tax year, so I haven’t been able to get to my 2014 predictions as promised. I’m headed home on Friday so look for the predictions column sometime over the weekend, thanks.
As some of you may recall I’ve been helping my sister care for our 89 year-old mother during an especially difficult period of her life, so if I haven’t been posting quite so much lately that’s why. But readers have been pestering me, nevertheless, for my annual column of predictions for the new year. And why not? But this time I really need your suggestions, which I’d like you to write in the comments below or — if you prefer — send to me: bob@cringely.com.
I see 2014 as a pivotal year for a lot of us when we clearly define what this decade is about for technology. It can’t be just cloud computing, apps, and social networking can it? I don’t think so. Look for my ideas (and some of yours) later in the week.
Thanks for the help.
I have a gut feeling that by the end of 2014 we’ll be paying significantly less for wireless services, as the U.S. market saturates with smart phones all with the same functionality. Predictably, following T-Mobile’s recent announcement of bring-your-own-phone no-contract plans, AT&T just announced the same yesterday, and the others will soon follow.
Perhaps 2014 will also be the year that Apple finally implements some Big Plan to revolutionize television.
I am hoping that more state governments and perhaps even the fed will decide that America should catch up to the rest of the developed world with faster broadband access. But that’s a wish, not a prediction.
The Sprint & T-Mobile merger will drive up prices.
I’m not so sure… Much as I dislike the idea of moving from 4 wireless majors to 3, I don’t really consider either T-Mobile or Sprint to be a major, at least not in my area.
We’re not really into to mobile era yet. We’ve had a pay-as-you-go Virgin Mobile cellphone for years, which uses Sprint towers. There’s no coverage at our home, though there is in town, where we usually need it. Last summer there was also no coverage in northwest Montana.
I just bought a Trac-phone a week ago, which uses ATT towers. I now have coverage at home, and I presume better coverage when traveling. I would consider Sprint and T-Mobile to be minors, so we now have 2 majors and 2 minors. Perhaps with the merge we will have 3 majors, which might be better, though I’ll agree still not good.
Blackberry exits the phone market.
Bill Gates, faced with the choice of becoming CEO, as serious candidates keep turning down Microsoft with hime and Ballmer still on the board, resigns as Microsoft chairman. Collapse of PC market and Microsoft inability to make mobile progress continue apace.
1) Bitcoin will rise and eventually crash (as governments will not support it) becoming a distant memory by years end.
2) Wearables (iWatch etc) will be introduced and widely adopted more mainstream.
3) Innovation in 3d printers will make them be seen out in the field more and new uses propagating.
A no brainer in more ways than one…..
Software functionality will continue to be reduced to suit the lowest common denominator. Interfaces, e.g., e-mail programs, will get more and more alike in what someone (often Apple) has decided is the most efficient or easiest way do the task, irrespective of what is required by the user. No longer will there be the capability to do advanced things to improve your workflow without choosing niche products from publishers lacking the resources to make them truly easy to use and very functional at the same time.
Apple will continue leading the charge in this direction, and the rest of the industry, copycats, will blindly follow it down that path.
Longtime Mac users will be faced with the choice of Windows which still has some pretence of backward compatibility, or Linux. Or frontal lobotomy so they will be happy with the only marginal functionality Apple seems determined to foist on everyone nowadays.
Will Mac developers jump ship and start writing Linux apps of the quality that their Mac apps are, and therefore improve the overall quality of Linux apps? Unlikely, but you never know.
Oh yes! Remember how we all hated MS, the great predator, and its appetite for world domination? Everyone wanted to diss MS, didn’t they? Well now the fruit-monickered underdog is having its day and many of us are waking up to just how bloody awful it is to use. I just bought my wife an iPad because all her colleagues were waving them around at work thinking they were in the vanguard of the IT coolcats. 500 quid down the toilet. Seems the only way of communicating with it is via e-mail (so fast, so convenient) or iTunes (don’t get me started!). File structure, pah! It’s like buying a Ferrari with the bonnet welded shut and the satnav doing all the driving. Just a toy.
Just to correct one thing, Apple stuff is not hard to use. It’s just that they are limiting the capability now so that less competent people can use it too. Sadly this means that people with more advanced capabilities or needs are left with nowhere to go.
In fact, Apple is in many ways becoming just like Microsoft in its heyday. Remember MS Project? A basic project management tool that everyone thought could do all they wanted so they never looked at anything else. Took years for other products to appear that were capable and useful. Hordes of other examples. Now look at Apple’s recent moves with dumbing down software and giving it away free.
I am reminded of George Orwell’s 1984, where words were gradually eliminated from the language to prevent people thinking beyond a limited range of topics because they had no way to express it. Dumb software will end up with people unable to think that they could have done some task faster, better or more efficiently ten years before.
What an odd sequence of posts. It’s like some kimd of nutty trolling contest. Here I am writing a response on my iPad — which five years ago would have been a magazine or maybe a laptop cooking my thighs — while watching my TV which offers content entirely on demand integratimg competimg on demand cloud services and my own private library and can be remotely controlled using almost every portable device in the house. I earn my living writing software that does stuff you needed a desktop office suite to do, only with better integration — in a web browser using standards compliant html and css — and I write this software on the finest computer I’ve ever used which combines the full power of unix with the best desktop gui around. Oh, and it’s all done by Apple. Wow, they really are screwing us.
Okay, okay. So the techno-wizardry you describe is a tour de force of human achievement. Really, it is. The iPad’s gorgeous, no question. I just want it to have some usable I/O functionality and an accessible file structure. Even my 1980 CP/M machine had that.
Not an odd sequence of posts at all — you may be using and developing full-featured software, but that’s not where the trend lies (and this is all about predictions).
–
I notice you didn’t say that you are developing anything on your Ipad. Also, I don’t think anyone would claim that development tools will ever follow the “remove all options” path because they will only be used by geeks — at least near-term.
–
Microsoft’s original “remove options” model was to try to do things for you, thinking that they were smarter than you. This usually ended badly because they tended to do things you for you that you did not want done.
–
Adobe’s model (at least for Acrobat Reader) was to alternate on subsequent revisions between multiple document and single document modes, with no way to swith between them within a revision. I am so glad they settled on single document mode because I hate hate hate having multiple documents in the same parent window.
–
Apple’s model is similar to Microsoft’s in that they think they know how we want to use a program, but they refrain from doing anything we don’t want them to. Options are just deleted.
Windows XP support, due to end on April 8, 2014, will be extended AGAIN — because so many damn people are still using it. (And Windows 8 is shite.)
iOS 7 is way shiter, let me tell you.
Apple will continue making products that people want to use. More Windows users will jump ship.
Microsoft will continue making stuff that people use under sufferance, believing it to be the cheaper option.
Linux devs will continue to make software that only they want to use. It’s free and still nobody wants it.
The Apple haters will continue, oblivious to the fact that nobody cares what they think.
Virtual currencies will be a passing fad but something related will appear and endure. Virtual credit?
The Cloud will go the way of Virtual Reality. At least until bandwidth costs get real and Cloud vendors can offer real privacy and security. Geographically localized Clouds?
Wearable computing will die a lingering death. The minimum UI size is bigger than a watch face. Remember the first digital watches with the red LEDs? How you had to press a button to see the time? LCDs fixed them up real good.
Microsoft will have to explain to their stockholders why they didn’t have one or more identified replacement candidate(s) for their CEO. Every company I worked for had a Replacement Table down to Branch level. Interesting to compare the replacement of Jobs with that of Ballmer.
My predictions for 2014:
1. The first glimmers of “free” energy will appear, despite the obstructions of the oil companies.
2. The wide use of 3D printers will bring local manufacturing to US cities, thus starting to negate the use of cheap labor in foreign manufacturing countries.
3. Artificial intelligence on a chip will open up a new field of computer use.
4. New disclosures from whistle blowers will finally force the arrest of high-level leaders of banks, brokerage firms, and bond-rating companies.
5. The price of gold and silver will begin a long uptrend as it is revealed that the US disposed of its gold holdings in Fort Knox years ago.
Wow, what a nice dream. You forgot to add:
— The fed and large banks will apologize and disband themselves voluntarily.
— There will never be another war ANYWHERE as love finally wins out.
— Unicorns and aliens are finally discovered.
Joe,
I liked the unicorn prediction the best. As for aliens, they were discovered in 1947 near Roswell, New Mexico.
Sorry. You’ve been drinking too much of that IBM Kool Aid.
Yes, John. I suppose a lot of people drink Kool Aid from time to time. However, I fail to see what IBM has to do with any of my predictions or other comments.
Brainslugs will invade the earth. The invasion will fail, as the invasion force starves to death.
Hey, Chris S,
Thanks for the great idea. Now when I do something stupid, I won’t say it’s because I’m getting old. I’ll say, “Oh my gosh, my brainslugs are eating away at me again!”
PCPlus ( windows+ android) laptops will further legitimize the idea of alternatives to Windows on the desktop and help Valve’s Steam device gain significant market share in gaming. Graphics drivers will improve further in this regard as well.
Microsoft will dump their spy-compromised OS underpinnings and build on top of a Linux/BSD base. Ok, Not.
Patent Trolls will face further backlash but the supreme court won’t go far enough in fixing the problem. Software patents will continue to impede software developent and drive innovation overseas. The U.S. will increase pressure on other nations to make the same mistakes in patenting software and implementing trademark extensions.
> Microsoft will dump their spy-compromised OS underpinnings and build on top of a Linux/BSD base. Ok, Not.
That’s actually a 10% chance sort of prediction – they could build a business out of Microsoft Linux, if they wanted.
Maybe a new MS CEO will have no compunctions about swallowing that kind of toad, especially if he’s an outsider.
(Condolences, Bob. Give us a few words about the lady, and tell us her name. Sorrows divided, etc.)
Hey, Bob, whatever happened to your 2013 predictions?
.
Oh, wait:
.
(2012) Prediction 8: No more predictions
https://www.cringely.com/2012/01/05/prediction-8-no-more-predictions/
.
🙂
2014 prediction – Return of the Managed Fat Client in the corporate world
I see a return to managed Fat Clients with web-based Cloud Applications (private and public), no desktop or application virtualisation and no BYOD either.
Because it ends up cheaper if you add all costs up, especially the cost of the added complexity, headaches for the users and the reoccuring costs for software licences, it has become very easy to manage a windows pc with the never OSes and the savings on the hardware side are becoming neglible.
Not sure I follow “…it has become very easy to manage a windows pc with the newer OSes…” . It’s exactly the same for Windows 8 Pro. It may be easier to manage Windows RT devices (now called Windows 8 devices without the Pro moniker), but right now no one is willing to manufacture them except Microsoft. In other words, it looks like the market has rejected the simpler OS so far.
Amazon won’t do drone delivery in 2014 – The reasons for this are many. Drones are limited by payload, to ability to land, the amount of energy they can hold for flight time and piloting. It is no small feat to fly a single drone let alone a parcel carrying fleet of them. Secondly, what do you do if the recipient isn’t at the landing zone? And we haven’t addressed ill-defined regulatory issues.
Small data – Hadoop is now bandied around like it is a common tool when in reality it only benefits the largest data sets. 2014 could benefit from a renewed focus on delivering value by sorting out the small data first.
Offline to online integration – companies like cini.me, rivals Verifone and Brightmove media for cinema and taxi advertising respectively are symptomatic of a wider move that integrates online and offline media. The holy grail would be a multi-channel customer journey with correct levels of attribution of sales. We are starting to get there with the right context data sets: location-based weather forecasts, geo-fencing and Apple’s iBeacon
Chinese technology brands will finally be successful outside China – Xiaomi’s vertically integrated model of hardware, software and services is looking to expand outside of China to reach a larger Southeast Asian audience. CyanogenMod-based smartphones provide other manufacturers to follow a similar model. Oppo’s N1 was recently launched CyanogenMod edition phone gained Google certification, paving the way for other integrated offering like Xiaomi, so expect software and service innovation. Especially given that Google’s Android team won’t engage with the hundreds of manufacturers in Shenzhen. Tencent’s WeChat will break through, based firstly on foreign brands looking to engage with Chinese consumers within and outside the country – expect a bridgehead to be built by the hospitality industry.
Privacy issues won’t change much with consumers – Whilst legislators may wring their hands and engineers build new products consumers won’t do much mainly because of inertia and a sense that it’s just way things are. Don’t believe me? Case in point, how many people do you know have moved their bank account?
Technology company workers are the new bankers – protests in Oakland over Google commuter buses, technology sites giving Hello-esque coverage of staff canteens and luxury office and East London warping into something similar to Notting Hill a couple of decades ago, coupled with a growing army of working poor is going to create a heady mix of jealousy and the inevitable backlash similar to the student bashing.
The rise of immersion – From the Oculus Rift glasses to a creative agency in Argentina using haptic technology to allow fathers to share with mothers how their child is developing as part of a marketing campaign for a babycare brand – immersive technologies are once more on the ascendancy for the first time since the mid-1990s.
I agree that Amazon won’t do drone delivery in 2014. I also think that the entire drone issue is a red herring. What people SHOULD be focusing on is not those cool little quad copters but the fact that Amazon wants to control the last mile. Will they be able to deliver a package in 30 minutes or less via drone? Probably not. Will they be able to deliver a package in 60 minutes or less without FDX/UPS/USPS? Maybe. Can they hit a 90 minute delivery time using a local courier service? MUCH more likely.
Seeing as how they are one of the biggest domestic shippers in the B2C space, their desire to handle their own delivery should be a HUGE wake up call to the big guys.
The Amazon drone thing is far future. People have the idea wrong as well. Maybe in the 2050’s they will fly all over the city, but not soon.
It makes some since if you imagine the Amazon truck going slowly down the street. A drone launches with a small package and drops it on the door step then returns to the top of the truck. A hundred yard flight, but that can save them millions in time and money.
I agree UPS. Fedex and the other big players should be worried.
Microsoft will write off $500 million on the ‘surface 2’ models, and announce ‘Surface 3’.
Microsoft will not find a suitable CEO, and the internal business units will continue to run riot.
IBM will face 3 * 1 billion dollar project failure lawsuits. Share price will continue to rise.
Apple’s A8 will have a bigger footprint with added functionality (M7, Comms) and 2GB RAM.
It will scream.
The BitCoin bubble will burst. As usual, many people will complain, but their losses will be theirs alone. Unlike what happens with real money’s devaluation, many units of this “digital currency” will be LOST forever (unlike real money, that can be printed on and on, lost bitcoins can’t be replaced). At some point, someone with enough curiosity will try to figure out how much of the total is unaccounted for (as opposed to “still unclaimed”); academic debates will discuss the findings, but nothing will come out of it.
Actually there was quite a big news item in the UK recently about how some geek had mined a load of Bitcoins three or four years ago, then forgotten about it. This year he took some of his old tin boxes down to the dump and then, many weeks later, read of the value of Bitcoins. By this time, they were worth around $6 million, but buried on a stone age hard drive under 10,000 tons of food waste and loaded nappies. Shame.
The trend with low-quality, indecently-wide PC monitors will begin a much needed reversal: higher-quality (think IPS), larger monitors, in a proper 5:4 or even 4:3 ratio, will become easily available again. Perhaps even with “retinal displays”.
That would be nice. I fail to understand why the displays we use for work must be constrained by the need to seat more asses in front of screens in giant rooms back in the 1950s.
(Not that for entertainment purposes those wide screens serve any better – nothing of interest happens in the periphery, which was chopped off with no big loss in the days of 4:3 TVs. And perhaps we could see the actors’ heads and feet at the same time again …)
I think this is the decade when all that imbedded stuff we’ve talked about for years finally starts showing up. Nest-like products will show up first in the house followed by smart light bulbs. Who knows what will happen in cars. There will be a little chip in everything and a processor in anything that has power.
Desktop sales will continue to drop but will level off as a greying population realizes they can’t see those tiny screens.
Bob will retire and un-retire from writing this column 2 more times.
There will be a Black Swan.
By definition we cannot know more until it happens,
1. IBM sells their server/storage business and the ‘M’ no longer stands for ‘machine’.
2. SaaS continues to grow but users (businesses) learn hard lessons with security breaches & outages
3. Security Breaches continue to be a huge problem and the NSA latches their ‘see-all’ story to this problem to justify their massive spying. Nobody buys the story as NSA can’t prove they’ve actually stopped or caught anyone.
4. ACA (a/k/a Obamacare) continues its march with improved scalability and reliability.
5. Apple has a stellar year with multiple product introductions (iPhones, laptops, iWatch).
6. Microsoft introduces a new CEO but the old problems persist and they continue to lose the desktop.
American cultural dominance will decline throughout the world. Movies, music, food, cars, computer software brands will be challenged by Indian, Chinese and others. This will be due to generalized American ennui, rising self-confidence elsewhere, the activities of the MPAA and RIAA, patent trolls, and last but not least, the US government and its NSA, etc.
IBM will exit the hardware business or be close to doing so.
Due to the strong sales of Chromebooks, the first “killer app” that uses Chrome’s Native Client will be a business app, not a game.
Artificial Intelligence computing is going to dramatically change how business consumes and uses compute power. Once computers can learn, a geometric jump in analytics will occur, how we use or abuse that information is going to cause a huge political and financial debate.
Topics of interest:
Snowden
New Apple Products
Microsoft Management
Yahoo’s Next Moves
Blackberry Comeback
IBM, of course
Healthcare.gov
Here’s a few video predictions:
.
The number one TV show during one of the sweeps periods will be watched mostly after it airs, on DVRs, VOD, Hulu+, Netflix, etc. Nielsen Ratings miss at least a third of the views because of their “3 day” policy.
.
Cable will lose more video customers to streaming Internet video and off air antennas than they do to DirectTV.
.
Video over the Internet will hit 70% of the prime time traffic and 40% of daytime traffic.
.
Apple will introduce an upgrade to Apple TV that makes video podcasting easy. Google reorganizes YouTube (again) to make it easier to find content from the couch.
.
Online gambling will be permitted in several more US states. As more states allow it, a casino will offer streaming real-time sports feeds if you bet on the game. ESPN/Disney sues.
.
Bob’s comments section will begin to read line feeds from Apple devices. 🙂
Not sure I see how any casino would let themselves broadcast a live sport event without rights. ESPN would sue who? For what?
“Apple will introduce an upgrade to Apple TV that makes video podcasting easy. Google reorganizes YouTube (again) to make it easier to find content from the couch.”
.
.
.
Oh, I hope you are right on this one.
Already seeing little nibbles of it on my Roku box with new apps (HBO, ESPN) allowing cable content to be viewed without a cable box. But will 2014 be the year the cable box is finally killed off?
This one may be a year early, but I predict that the new 4k monitors and TVs will be the end of the cable empire and the rise of Google Fiber.
The more people that buy these new sets, the greater the demand will be for programming that will make use of the new technology. Seeing as how a 4k signal contains approximately 4 times the amount of data of a HD signal, cable companies will be scrambling to upgrade their infrastructure in order to meet the demand. Google fiber, on the other hand, will have hopefully gained enough ground to be the new de facto standard for cable TV.
That is an interesting prediction. But I don’t see Cable or Satellite TV ending anytime soon, mainly because the majority of America is not in large cities on an ocean coastline. Google Fiber is a great idea, but is likely not to have any affect outside of reasonably large cities. I also think that the idea of replacing HD with anything more dense is unlikely for two reasons: cost and timelines. TVs are appliances to most of the world; in fact phones are the same way but just are saturated enough to show it. Most people will not upgrade a TV in less than 4-5 years without some major, perhaps perceived, benefit. That means that it will take over 2 years for a new TV technology to get in enough homes to make a difference. The HD “revolution,” if I remember correctly, actually took close to 5 years to get there; I know CBS started limited HD broadcasting in 1997 in the US, with some countries being even earlier than that.
Even if Google Fiber caught on over the entire US, which is highly unlikely anytime soon, I doubt we’d see a change in TV/entertainment format happen quickly.
1) As cloud solutions proliferate, opportunities for failure will follow suit. A big one will happen soon, not sure if it’s in 2014 or 2015.
2) Small companies will utilize the cloud offerings to reduce IT staffing. Some will even eliminate full time staff and rely on part time or consultants.
3) Consumer use of credit cards will decline slightly as hackers continue to find ways to get into big companies systems. On the positive side, reporting of these incidences will start happening closer to real time than has been the norm in the past.
4) Not IT related but, small companies will use the Affordable Care Act to eliminate offering medical forcing employees to pay even more.
5) A new password paradigm will finally be unveiled.
6) Companies and people will wake up and realize that Facebook is not the internet. OK, maybe I’m just dreaming here.
Thanks to revelations that the NSA is building trapdoors in virtually all US hardware-software, there will be severe market consequences for cooperating companies.
The hype about self driving cars will continue to gain momentum. There is a thirty year cycle in auto design and the 2020’s will be an exciting new era. For example autos were invented around 1900, the 1930’s cars are still remembered for excellent design and engineering breakthroughs. 1960’s autos were beautiful, strong, reliable and loved. The Japanese imports of the 1990’s swept through the market and devastated the North American and European manufacturers. With the arrival of the first self driving cars in the 2020’s consumers will find motivation to seek brand new rides – should be fun and fifty miles per gallon!
With 10,000 baby boomers retiring daily for the next twenty years there will be huge demand in many markets for services and products aimed at this historically relevant group. Having been devastated by the shenanigans of the banking and war/political industries we should expect these ‘semi idle millions’ to evolve into an attractive new market as their grandchildren, the ‘echo boomers / Facebook crowd’ becomes primarily interested in their careers.
You mentioned self-driving cars and retirement in the same paragraph without drawing the obvious conclusion.
The self-driving car is the obvious solution to the problem of seniors with diminishing capacity who still crave independence. They may become unsafe to drive themselves, but with a self-driving car they’re all set. The popular version may even come with steering wheel and pedals – taken as “suggestions” by the car as it finds the safe route to where Grandma or Grandpa wants to go.
Regarding self driving cars… It is possible today to have self driving trains. Since the route is controlled by the rails, the automation controls the speed. It is a shame we’ve been too slow and stubborn to implement this technology. It would have prevented a couple bad accidents recently.
.
Apple will be in position to take over the enterprise market while the desktop PC market completely collapses.
This is Apple’s to lose. And, they may blow their chance at total dominance for the next decade. Apple would have to remain focused, but they haven’t been to good at that. IWork wasn’t updated for years and a sudden (and bad) rewrite. ILife needs an update too. Apple takes big initiatives and then gets distracted.
However, MS dominance on the desktop is weaker than we realize. PC on each desktop is expensive. Malware is a constant threat. The change from licensing software to annual licensing is needed, but businesses aren’t happy.
Back in the 1990s, businesses gave you a cell phone. Then, they gave you money for one. Now you bring your own. The desktop PC will go the same way. Look at any office, and you see roomfuls of obsolete PCs.
Apple has the pieces. The iPad can replace almost all of the functionality of the desktop PC. Companies can and are writing their own software. Pages and Numbers are not only “good enough” for 90% of the do documents produced, but they have the framework for incredible collaboration. Live document collaboration? It’s on Pages and Numbers – not MS Office.
“But I need to do more than what I can do on an iPad.”, you say. True, and you’ll get your Windows PC or Mac. Excel number jockeys can still write macros and connect to SQL databases. I didn’t say Microsoft is going out of business. However 90% of spreadsheets are mere lists. 90% of Word documents are
memos. Putting a PC on each desk is expensive. And to do that for the 5% of the employees who need the full power of a PC is too expensive. Besides, the iPad can use a PC via Citrix. Virtual PCs remotely hosted. I think Robert Cringely is familiar with that.
Like cellphones, you’ll be asked to bring your own iPad. Maybe at first, you’ll be given one, but it won’t be worth ITs expense to track them. That iPad will be yours to keep? Want a better model, or you need to replace it? You need to spend your own money.
Without desktop PCs, encrypted WiFi can take over. There is no need for desktop assignment. Cubicles will disappear. You sit where you want. There will be conference tables, and meeting rooms. You can sit in the corporate cafeteria and work there while you sip coffee, or take a meeting room and work on that project with you colleagues.
That’s the big savings. 20% to 40% of the cubicles aren’t used. The PC takes up a lot of space on a desk. Companies can reduce their office space by over 1/3. I bet a good chunk of that is just space wasted storing three year old PCs that no one wants.
Transformations are expensive. Companies don’t like doing them unless they see savings. One of the casualties of the PC revolution was the srcretarial pool. Even CEOs are expected to write their own damn letters. The tablet revolution could save a bundle in both IT and real estate. That is Apple’s opening, and they have all the pieces.
The question is whether Apple can focus on this goal, or gets distracted by some shiny new play pretty. If Jobs was at the helm, I put my money on blowing it. Jobs may have been a creative genus, but he got distracted by faux green felt and leather while Andriod was making gains on iOS. If Cook can remain focused, he maybe exactly what Apple needs.
What you are talking about is BYOD, (Bring your own device).
There are already some “enterprise” companies like Yammer that are successful.
Here is a prediction. We will see a BYOD company that gets real traction and a whole lot of hype (funding) in 2014.
This contributes to the decline of Microsoft, but does not help Apple much. The default device is a cheap Android tablet, in the sub $200 category. It is the good enough computing device for the office. Surface tablet 3 gets some of this business, but not enough to make it a Microsoft success.
It does help Google and Amazon as the big cloud service providers.
I see it the other way: Microsoft’s new CEO drives the vision of the future which is unified phone and desktop or tablet OS for the enterprise. Apple is just not going to make it happen except in the consumer space. The iDevices are already the suburban Mom’s choice, and the teenagers chatterbox. Real business needs to account for brownfield legacy devices, and neither Apple nor Google understands enterprise needs like MS. I have colleagues who have ditched their laptop for Surface Pro, and plug into monitors and keyboards to create a workstation.
Better yet, what if Nokia could build a phablet with enough juice to plug into a dock and become a workstation? From 3 devices to 1.
I would love to see that. I’ve been using a version of OQO’s dockable umpc since 2007. Currently using the latest model they developed, but never sold since they went out of business in 2009: http://web.archive.org/web/20110725135644/https://www.oqo.com/ (I suspect the industry, including Microsoft, would rather sell us three devices instead of one.)
I’ve been saying this for 10 years that Apple could own the enterprise market and effectively own the world (in North American terms) if they buy an ERP software company. At least one, if not three. You can not rise to such dominance without owning an accounting software system for business. There is already a system for retail store accounting that’s impressive enough written for the Mac but what is needed is a system like Softrend Systems Inc.’s software for the rest of business. Unfortunately Softrend’s software is not yet ported to the Mac but with Apple’s help, it would take 2 years and a whole lot less money than trying to buy AccPac, Sage, or SAP. That would give apple a wild card into the business world. I don’t know many businessman that would stay with Microsoft PCs if Apple gave them a solution to move to. It’s not a prediction for this year but I can’t believe the squandered opportunity by apple to obtain enterprise dominance within a 3-year period if they executed on this strategy. Also, an Xbox style of TV device will permit them to own the home environment and the coming new market segment of home automation. With those two market segments, there’s not much else of importance to own.
Apple will not buy into the business market on any large multi-billion dollar scale. The main reason is that it’s hard, and Apple doesn’t do hard things.
Apple is all about simple and elemental, control and restriction, elegant and changeable. Consumers usually don’t have much legacy content to support, don’t have too many rules about what they will and won’t accept, aren’t all that cost conscious (if they think they’re getting something for their money) and do what they’re told for the most part.
Businesses, on the other hand, have many hard requirements that preclude mass following to the New Shiny Thing and dropping The Old Boring Thing. They have to support old systems, they have rigorous security rules, many can’t spend freely and they are frequently stymied in the pursuit of cool by the boring reality of ROI.
How would Apple handle the ongoing saga of killing off XP? As a business customer I look at the casual dropping of their Xserver systems for a “use a Mac Mini backed up by another Mini” and shake my head, and Apple knows this. There’s so much consumer money to be made with so little effort that they want nothing to do with a business market that’s sliding to a five year depreciation schedule for hardware, or needing to support Flash because a third party vendor chose it, or rejecting the 30% Apple store tithe on enterprise software. For education buyers they simply announce that your language class title based on Flash won’t run on their One-To-One program hardware and cash the checks. Consumers know that when a battery dies they toss the device. The iTunes store drops titles without warning or explanation. Ownership is a casual term when they can kill off something you paid for with a click.
Business users are demanding and not worth the effort. They aren’t buying SAP or even Sage, much less putting effort into a new business platform.
Oracle will be/should be sued for its abominable failure with both the national healthcare.gov and Oregon healthcare exchange website. Regarding the latter, the state paid Oracle $40 million, and the website, as of today, has been unable to successfully sign up even ONE person.
Snowden revelations will force several high tech CEOs to resign.
As I recall, Bob reported on massive campus built by computing companies to house massive data centers for cloud computing.
Tens of billions of dollars were spent on the cloud computing idea.
Snowden pretty much turned cloud computing as a non starter for important information.
This means the billions spent on cloud computing are going to be largely a bust.
This is why computing companies have been complaining to Obama about the NSA’s activities.
The clamor will grow for Edward Snowden to be given the whistleblower’s amnesty by the US that he richly deserves. In 2014 he may get it. And we may get some workable spying restrictions from Congress. Or will pigs need to fly first?
I agree he deserves it, but he won’t get it in 2014. Maybe in January 2017 in a presidential pardon on Obama’s last day. Then again, maybe not.
.
I’ve longed maintain, that ones perspective on Snowden is correlated to where one sits in the establishment pecking order. The higher up you are in the establishment, including media and the like, the more you dislike Snowden. Time Magazine is fairly high up in the establishment, so they didn’t see a need to make Snowden the 2013 man of the year, but in retrospect, he clearly deserves that. Ordinary people see him as a source of their empowerment.
Before Snowden, the biggest thing going in the information system word was cloud computing. After Snowden that made less sense than before (and it made little sense before – the cost of information storage is cheap, so why handle much of it over to a 3rd party?)
Amazon will announce they will use flying pigs to deliver packages, as drones don’t have enough capacity. and who doesn’t want free bacon instead of free delivery?
the US will become a second-rate technological power due to Snowden and the NSA. nobody will trust our stuff any more and thus nobody will buy it.
and everybody will be happy with what they are computing with, because nobody will sell anything better to US citizens because they don’t want it compromised.
You’re dreaming.
He will never see his home again.
I see 2014 as another great year. With 2013 being the first year of my retirement. After 38 years in IT and following RXC and many others over the decades from their earliest comments in Infoworld (when it was in its original large-format-newsprint version) it remains a great touchstone that I continue to recommend to those I know just launching their careers.
Bob (and others) will weather the changing of the industry just as they did when moving from mainframes to personal computers, when the LAN took off, then the WAN, then the return to centralization of data for decentralized devices.
Just remember that “The Cloud” can’t work as long as many people don’t have highly reliable broadband. “Fly over land” matters.
The U.S. finally, really, actually gets serious about broadband … for real.
I mean, c’mon folks, when Latvia has better broadband than we do …
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/technology/us-struggling-to-keep-pace-in-broadband-service.html
3D printers remain more than consumers want to deal with in large numbers. However, a cottage industry of small businesses will arise, those businesses focused around copy or manufacture of one-off components, replacements and the like for consumers who can stay at home, avoid the hardware store, and request that they be delivered. This will last until 3D printers and their supplies are inexpensive enough and software plans are available and cheap enough for everyman to download from the web and run off on the home replicator.
1. a low level microsoft flunky will be thumbing thru dusty 90s era print publications (?!) and see that ibm is moving away from consumer level technology and toward fortune 100 and governement lock in technology. he/she/it will wrap it up in a bow and deliver it to upper management as a strategy of survival. flunky gets fired for he/she/it’s trouble. next stock holder meeting management trumpets new strategy based on months of intense study: ditch consumer failure and ennui for fortune 100 / governement contract lock in long term money making machine. adopted. microsoft saved.
2. our esteemed host will say he’s leaving this column for good. at the end of the year will still be writing column.
What about the trickle-down benefits, or the less-than-obvious benefits of Cloud computing? Enterprise class storage (e.g. SAN) has always been expensive (the storage tax), and usually uninspiring technology, with significant vendor lock-in pain. In short, Enterprise storage looks a lot like mainframe computing of days gone by. But in the Cloud, particularly in the real datacenter or back-end, the limitations of existing technologies like RAID6 have become apparent. In the case of RAID6, rebuild times on failed drives with sufficiently large datasets and busy disk I/O characteristics can take hours/days to rebuild, resulting in real-world risk while waiting for drives to rebuild… so much so, that it’s not only possible but increasingly likely that multiple drive failures will occur and result in real data loss. Many companies are now competing in this data durability space, with the net result being “software defined storage”. In this case, Microsoft of all companies, in the form of their Storage Spaces feature of Windows Server 2012 R2 is actually driving some competition in the Enterprise storage space… pushing the big names (Dell, HP, NetApp, etc.) to start innovating a bit more, while Storage Spaces works to eliminate the traditional storage tax imposed by big storage in the on-premises mid-size enterprise market. Here are some more thoughts on this topic…https://www.stackaccel.com/the-enterprise-storage-market-in-2014-storage-for-the-rest-of-us/
The phrase “skynet” will be discovered in an obscure piece of Google code placed there by an engineer who thought it was funny.
.
AmazonFreshPrime will launch in the US.
.
Amazon will purchase Uber or Lyft.
.
AmazonPrime will launch in many areas of Europe. France will pass laws prohibiting it.
.
Amazon will launch drones for delivery in some other country as a proof-of-concept.
.
The U.S. Postal service will stare down Congress and eliminate a single day of delivery. Not once a week, just one day total.
.
Apple, Google and Facebook will continue to acquihire, killing great products in the process.
.
Another public/private enterprise will propose a model community in a radio-free-zone. It will be well-received but never come to fruition.
.
High-speed rail will still fail to make any progress in the U.S.
Nothing will change at the NSA. They/gov will wait till the public’s attention drifts off. Can’t trust the company’s protest either as they won’t tell us if he going ons are as usual. I predict a company may secretly bill the gov their expected losses in contracts from foreign buyers.
1. Nuclear war will be avoided during 2014.
2. Sales growth of pads and smartphones in industrialized world will slow. Eventually spread to 3rd world.
3. Iran will continue its nuclear weapons program, but more slowly.
4. Malaria will not be eradicated.
5. The cyber security situation will get even worse.
6. Non digital appliances will perform clandestine digital surveillance.
7. Cold fusion will continue to not work.
8. Hot fusion on earth will not be available for generating electricity.
9. The lucky ones among us will get another year older.
10. The Euro-zone will continue to punish itself with economic austerity.
11. Politicians will continue to disappoint us.
12. The Arab-Israeli crisis will not be resolved.
13. The Silver Bullet for software development will not be discovered.
Did you ever read “Make Room! Make Room!” by Harry Harrison? It was (very) loosely adapted into the movie “Soylent Green”. Your post is vaguely reminiscent. I’d rather hope that at least something will get better, if not much.
After reading these comments, I appreciate your prediction list more than the average joe.
rewrite: After reading these comments, I appreciate the effort you put into your prediction list more than one created by the average person.
You’ve made my day. Thank You.
North Korea will put a 1000 lb device in polar orbit, claim that it’s a nuclear bomb capable of generating an EMP that will affect 80% of North America, and agree to reopen talks regarding sanctions against the peoples regime. Following the end of sanctions, video game sales to NK will triple, so Kim will have some use for multiplayer games. His cousins will decline to win against him.
Foxconn will manage to slip a hidden decryption device in Blackberry phones, but nobody will know for years (except NSA, who, by monitoring Chinese networks will detect that the Chinese have sourced info from Blackberry, but NSA won’t say anything because that could reveal to some extent their own capabilities.)
Snowden will be offered amnesty, but will decide that it’s safer to stay in Russia. His second book won’t be published in 2014. His first will be posted on the web for free by NSAnonyleaks about 1 week before its publisher’s scheduled on-sale date. But, with all names redacted, that version will a bit less interesting than the real thing.
Patent trolls will continue to reward generally unknown inventors who have been rebuffed for royalty agreements from major electronics manufacturers for brilliant ideas.
It will be a humorous New Year for cynics.
Re: “North Korea will put a 1000 lb device in polar orbit”. The West will use if for target practice and continue sanctions.
My 2014 predictions:
(1) Blackberry spins off QNX.
(2) Chinese tech firm buys wreckage of Blackberry.
(3a) You’ll see an Android tablet at the supermarket checkout.
(3b) Emerging cheap single purpose screens show up in stores.
(4) WiFi-only phones emerge.
(5) nVidia exits mobile CPU market.
(6) Intel beefing up on LTE will hurt Qualcomm.
(7) Wearables will be worn by early adopters but shunned by consumers.
(8) Personal life-logging will start a new trend.
(9) States will start designating texting areas on roads (a la New York
(10) Smartphones evolve towards always-on, always-recording (voice, photos, location).
(11) HTC put on life support by market and Taiwanese government.
(12) Debut of disposable feature phones introduces disposable tech that is coming.
(13) Samsung does not have the top selling smartphone in 2014.
Details about these predictions are at my blog:
https://www.pdxmobile.com/?p=28664
I see the start of logging a great deal about us where we will create huge data pools for every individual.
An Android Point-of-Sale system that could be used for supermarket checkout among many retail types is being announced for the NRF in NYC show this week or next. Customers are already using some in production beta. There some interesting developments in I/O control in that platform. It is not a mobile handset, but an Android tablet with voice communications instead of using Windoze or DR-DOS.
A random attendee at the next CES will be chosen to run Microsoft.
The quality of television programming will continue to rise in proportion to the square root of the number of pixels on the tv multiplied by the number of characters who speak with English accents.
Carlos Danger will be the 23rd most popular boy’s name.
Ray Kurzweil will become transhuman and finally get his wish of being installed in a server rack somewhere outside of Mountain View, CA.
In an effort to improve its image the NSA will try community outreach in the public schools with a character dubbed “Officer Nosy”.
My car will become smarter than I am. And more popular. And have more sex.
As if running one of the world’s largest ecommerce sites and newpapers wasn’t enough, Jeff Bezos will finally reveal that he is, indeed, also Pitbull.
Somebody will be awarded a software patent describing a process for patenting software. An entire industry will say “DOH!”
The word “privacy” will have air quotes around it in all product promotional materials.
Amazon’s first drone strike will be season 3 of “Friends” on Blu-ray. It will be sent to Marie Patterson of 2328 N. Raymond, Cleveland OH. She will not be home at the time so the drone will leave a note.
1: Bill Gates will become “interim” CEO of Microsoft. The chance to out-Jobs Jobs will be too much to resist.
2: A major bank hack involving the bank’s internal record keeping will kill a mid-sized institution. Unable to make good on lost deposits it will be swiftly taken over by the FDIC and liquidated.
3: A two-week outage of Google Docs caused by a malicious attack on the replication technology between Google data centers will seriously impact Google’s short-term plans to displace Office as the world’s leading productivity suite. The problem will involve subtle corruption on a low level that will affect most documents stored in the cloud, but not catastrophically. People will still be able to recover most of their data, but a few swapped bytes in most files mean nobody trusts that what they have is “totally unaffected” despite Google’s best efforts to find and fix the errors.
4: The DJIA will end the year within 5% of where it ends 2013. During the year there will be few periods when it is 10% higher or lower than it is on January 1.
5: World of Warcraft will lose a third of its western full-price subscribers over a six month period beginning around April. The result will be a big setback for Activision/Blizzard’s stock price and a rush-to-release of Blizzards next MMO, hurriedly scheduled for an early 2015 launch.
6: Apple will not launch an Apple-branded TV. Instead it is preparing to launch a whole new kind of living room device centered on intelligently figuring out what you are trying to do with your A/V equipment, and doing it for you. It will mount on the ceiling and look like a small featureless fire alarm. The device will be able to send all the required IR signals to every device in your living room, and detect changes in audio and visual content to ensure that its commands were correctly received and interpreted. You will plug Apple Ports into all your devices, and the Apple control center device in your living room will be able to receive, and route wirelessly all of your content to and from where it needs to go to work correctly, removing the need for most cables except power. The whole system will work on voice commands. Apple’s pitch will be “a life without remote control”. If you request a show that is not currently being provided on demand by your cable company, stored in your digital archives, or connected to your iTunes account, the system will allow you to make a micropayment on the spot to stream that show from participating providers. To ensure a wide variety of content for this system, Apple will buy Hulu.
“Apple will buy Hulu”
I’d like to change that to a more realistic Apple will cut a deal with Hulu, or some other provider, to make most of that provider’s content free on the new/updated device/OS. I don’t think Apple would want to buy a content provider, it would hurt their relations with other providers. But using such a deal to pressure the other providers, well, yes they would do that. On the other side of things, I can see Hulu wanting a deal with Apple.
I could easily see #2 and #3 happen without a doubt.
#5 will most likely happen, but it won’t be due to any new MMO on the market, particularly Wildstar. Blizz has shown that they can fend off other companies’ competing products quite well, but they’re now fighting their own legacy in WoW, which has pretty much jumped the shark.
1: Bill Gates will become “interim” CEO of Microsoft. The chance to out-Jobs Jobs will be too much to resist.
.
I’ve suspected all along that the grand plan was for BG to step down from the CEO position at Microsoft until the heat from their antitrust troubles had passed (which it largely has), and then have him come back at an opportune time in order to “save” Microsoft. People used to laugh at this idea, but it doesn’t seem so far-fetched these days, does it?
1) Mac OS X 10.10 will not be called 10.10 rather it will have a trendy name and continue the trend of less functionality, more bells and whistles, lower consumer satisfaction.
2) Windows 9 will be late, over hyped have less functionality, cost more and come with lower consumer satisfaction.
3) Netflix, Google, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and well basically everyone will all continue to commoditize consumers, muddy their webpages, sow fear doubt and confusion and lower consumer satisfaction.
4) Scandals will continue but consumer satisfaction will take a downward trend because let’s face it unending scandal is boring.
5) The next great thing will happen in computing, it will be small and we all have about a 50% chance of noticing it.
6) Money is going to be big news and of little consequence. Bitcoin, gold price inflation and market scares will have us buzzing but the inequality that perverts our economy will only get worse.
7) Telecom mergers won’t mean a thing because how can they really milk more money from us or lower consumer satisfaction?
8) Caturday will continue
Google will make more people mad than ever.
2014 in review
During 2014 many things stayed the same while some things changed.
Some of the things that changed were new technologies that helped make 2014 a very profitable year for some technology companies. One of the new things was…
A new Answer Engine or Angine was established on the WWW that could parse and answer questions on just about any topic. Sometimes the answers were not immediate but delayed for hours or days of research by bots but an answer(s) was always delivered. There was no charge for this service and no ads were present on the Web site. People quickly became addicted to receiving answers to their questions from Angine. Those other sources that would traditionally provide those answers quickly became jealous of Angine and a new sport of “berating it constantly” became popular with those disenfranchised elite. Angine soon became the nexus of much intellectual and enterprise thought and planning. Those few who despised Angine cried out against this new oracle. After six months Angine started giving out answers before people would ask the questions. Now, being so used to receiving the correct answers to their inquirers, people started welcoming these answers to phantom questions and acted religiously on them. People were anxious at the mere though of a time before Angine. Everyone seemed more happy and the world prospered, for a while.
Then a person asked Angine why it was providing answers to questions no one had asked. Angine replied that it divined the answers based on the history of questions. The algorithm for the phantom answers used the inquirers of all those others. There was an infinite number of answers and a infinitely small number of questions.
The next month Angine began providing spontaneous analysis of interpersonal relationships and we loved it. Who could dispute the fact that Angine said that one was lying to another or that your spouse was cheating on you or that your boss was not going to promote you or that your best friend said terrible things about you behind your back.
Within a week we were afraid to act without the warm caress of the voice of Angine in our ears.
2014 was a great year.
I predict the continuing fading of Facebook, as I did here a year or so ago, for exactly the same reason – 14-year-olds don’t use their parents’ fads.
The last decade is and has been about mobile and the shift away from desktop environments to simply, ‘mobile’. The next decade will be decided as follows; first five years, a transition from mobile specifically to wearable computing. Additionally, on the second front and for the second five-year timeframe; home automation.
I phoned Apple about 8 years ago and told them they should come out with a phone (which they obviously did) as well as a TV – and why. With the desktop computer slowly disappearing, tablets will eventually supplant even laptops. Content will exist for the most part ‘in the cloud’, except for personal and preferential files. Those will reside on the ‘personal’ server – which will be the TV control box or personal server. One can think of it as a personal storage device, but it will be the box that controls the TV. Surely, it should be an Apple TV-style of device, which will be a gaming device as well as the personal storage device. Backups will be to the cloud and there will be a blurry line between the device being a dumb device serving cloud content and an intelligent device doing that – and much more. With billions of additional IP addresses available for the world, home appliances will surely be bestowed many of those addresses making them controllable in your home from anywhere you are in the world, or in the back bedroom. Anyone porting a wearable device will be detected by the TV and vetted, recognized as ‘friendly’. Things like room temperature and lighting levels will all be done by the TV. Think of the TV box as an X-Box on steroids. Everyone will be able to watch their own content on their own tablet in their own room controllable by themselves.
So… 2014… Well, that’s the year when the TV will start to dawn as this new device and the scope of the future will become evident over time. It’s going to be huge.
So that is one of my projections for 2014
We will see.
Bob, great that you are doing predictions one more time. My humble thoughts below.
(a) cloud computing will continue to have some use, but no great takeoff due to lack of bandwidth in and out, security, vendor lock in and lack of decent connectivity at affordable cost for most of us.
(b) end-user devices will not be big enough to replace the PC, unless a common expansion platform is adopted
(c) the non-debate about overt and covert surveillance will continue with legal decisions contradicting each other
(d) Microsoft will make a bad choice for CEO who will rapidly cause massive losses.
(e) HP will make more losses, sack more staff and discover a severe capability shortfall causing potential customers to flee, along with existing customer base.
(f) IBM will be pressured by Intel to not leave x64 server space. LG and Samsung also will be spoken to.
(g) ARM designed devices will be come more ubiquitous
(h) Europe will have lots of committees talking about secure cloud providers, but buy Amazon anyway
(i) China will start to produce for international sale lots of good locally designed IT gear including CPU for states wary of possible trojanned US branded equipment.
(j) All user interfaces will get more user hostile
(j) An energy dense, long life battery technology will be nearly developed again and vanish by end of 2015
(k) self driving cars will be here real soon now.
(l) flying cars will not arrive.
(m) NASA will cancel Orion and other Moon targeted activities
(n) Apple will surreptitiously start to buy MS shares
IBM implodes in 2014, enough to be general public knowledge. Lawsuits follow and attorney generals become interested. “No one got fired for selecting IBM” becomes demonstrably false.
A major acquisition involving Red Hat…(Dell?)
The “Biggies” (GoogleAppleMSFacebookAmazon) buy vast amounts of land in the Mountain Time Zone states.
CryptoLocker cripples major company/city, encrypts their backups.
Jay Leno will have a show on a FOX-owned network.
1. Robots: delivery (Amazon), driving (Google), Caring (Honda). Shopping (Self Scan tills become Robots)
The economic problem of removing jobs like these out of the picture. Where do the new jobs come from? Surely not SEO.
2. Where is the influence? Jaron Lanier’s observation about the lack of a middle class or influential voice on the web makes trolling, anonymity, unacceptable behaviour okay. And Facebook etc use the influence void to make lots of money. Perhaps no different from previous gold rush but much pervasive. Who or what will lead to a civilised web?
3. Wearable tech. Who will make the best projector by 2020? Then wearable makes sense.
Bob, I want Quantum Computing to advance to the point where it can actually be used. Small-scale to start but a viability demonstration.
Maybe the copycats so oft mentioned above will decide to bring-back-the-desktop. Hopefully they will copy the new Mac Pro format and make real power available at an affordable price in a compact size.
These two might just slow the inexorable rise of the tablet format which while great, only aims at the lowest common denominator.
3D printing? Will it gain traction? I worry about poor quality building materials with an inherent multi-layered fault system built right in. Unless someone is working on improving…
Fed QE and pump priming will finally kick in and the velocity of money will increase rapidly. The Fed will be slow to take away the punch bowl and interest rates and the dollar will spike during a brief period of euphoria. Foreign holders of US bonds will use the opportunity to unwind their positions. Inflation will rise sharply, unions will increase membership and strikes, and the US competitive position compromised. Democrats will win both houses in the mid-term elections. Exchange controls will be enacted, leading to a massive increase in the bitcoin price. Northern California and some states will seriously consider seceding as stagflation takes hold. 1%-ers will increasingly renounce their citizenship. The US will be forced to close down numerous overseas military bases. The head of Al Qaida will send out a “Mission Accomplished” message.
Bob,
Always following the “master” at his work – Best wishes to you and yours and your mom for 2014.
As Always, i find your insights to be “spot on”. Some more Fodder for the cannon ball of 2014:
1) IBM will indeed falter, loose is lustre and fall from Grace. “I’ve Been Moved” will be the new term, either to the unemployment line or jail or . . . .
2) Android continues to gain “market-share” (useless term these days), vendors continue to loose money and drop out, google begins to see faster decliine in on-line ads (since mostly iPhone users actually USE their smartphones). The Race to the bottom continues.
3) War for “the pipe”:
a) Consumer: Cable companies and others (Google Fiber, Verizon FIOS) will continue to get pinched as users demand faster, cheaper pipes into their house. The fight over the “last mile” will get really nasty and very public (Austin Tx. anyone?)
b) Business: Companies will also want fatter pipes as they push more into the Cloud. It will all implode when Google gets hacked, and suffers major outages – businesses pull back in-house, storage & networkiing skyrocket.
c) Cloud: Amazon is and will remain king – Google will struggle, Apple puts up more capacity to continue to provide the “it just works” services consumers want (yes, I am biased)
4) Entertainment – i.e. TV/Cable: Cable companies will be get squeezed tighter between rock and hard place, as TV shows price themselves out of business (i.e. cable rates skyrocket) while consumers will use alternate means watch TV (Hulu, AppleTV, etc) Personally, I’m not completely ‘sold’ on the a la carte TV model yet, but I sense that day is not too far off (maybe 2015?) This factors into [3] above too.
5) SDN – well, the latest “buzz” in networking: A scheme for a “campus” is now being pushed far beyond it’s intended purpose. Intel will rally here, since they have servers @ the edge so they will use the extra CPU horsepower for this, while network vendors (Cisco, Juniper) will struggle. A solution looking for a problem I once read and partly agree. Decent concept, bad implementations. Sometimes the slow way is the best way Maud’Dib.
6) Apple (note, I am biased here, cut my teeth on Xerox Alto’s in early 80’s, been mousing around ever since): Ka Ching, Ka Ching, Ka Ching
Some views from my little (embedded) corner of the world:
1) Linux continues its ascension in the embedded world, Android hitches on, but companies run into roadblocks due to complexity and lack of support. It’s always “easier said than done” – expecially when dealing with the complexities of the Linux (all the CPU’s to support, esp. ARM SoC’s). “Good” Linux support in this space is hard to come by these days, the embedded world is ‘very different’ than the desktop world. RTOS’s for micro-controllers (M3/M4/M0) will continue to expand as these types of devices find new homes (see IoT below)
2) One ARM to Rule Them All: ARM continues to rule in the embedded space, the Far East SoC vendors (Rockchip, MediaTek, AMTech, etc.) will continue to push down smartphone/tablet prices (as someone said, buy one at the checkout stand at the grocery store like a pack of gum). PowerPC will continue to decline in all but specialized areas, MIPS will struggle, make some progress, but may end up being a bust in the end. Their stronghold is STB’s, but with the “pipe wars”, the future maybe bleak. Intel will try with their BayTrail SoC’s, but still hampered by the shadow that is Windoz.
3) The “multi-core” wars will take on a new shift – Rather than say a quad A9 SoC, you might get a Dual A9, dual M4’s, and a couple of M0’s all on chip (FSL Vybrid, NXP43xx, others). Different mixing of different cores, requires a very new (radical dare I say) approach to “system” design, since this will probably mix Linux on the A9’s and RTOS’s on the others. Will also require very new tools and support for tackling these sorts of beasts. Witness Apple’s A7: ARMv8 + M7 (rumored to be M3/M4 class device)
4) This new buzz: IoT – not really new, it’s been around us for quite some time (industrial arena), but is now taking off in very new directions. Exciting, but again will place pressure on “the pipe” so growth will be limited.
The world continues to be an exciting place to be. Having lived through this explosion through the past 30+ years, it’s all fun and exciting, but also tempered. The reality is NEVER what the Marketeers wish/plan for (except maybe for Apple, but not everyone is Apple either – Steve Jobs was right: it’s in their DNA). The world is Fragile, Life is Short – Live in the moment, express LIFE (Living In Fullest Expression).
Maybe more ongoing than for 2014 specifically but I think the advancement in robotics combined with AI technologies is going to a significant factor in our future lives. They might be crude to start with but I suspect the age of autonomous, thinking, learning machines will soon be upon us. What then for the unskilled workforce?
The only prediction that matters: Bob will finally get those NerdTV Season 2 videos to us.
“The only prediction that matters”. Agreed. 🙂
Technology related, since it relies so much on a flawed website:
The Affordable Care ACt will result in:
Fewer people will have health insurance than in 2013
And those that have insurance will be paying, on average, a higher premium than in 2013
Hard to say fewer people will have health care, since
there were 30 million of so without any and 1.1 have signed up for private plans
and 3+ million for Medicaid so far..
Should have gone with single payer…
The issue is whether new signups among the 30 million who didn’t want insurance anyway will overshadow forced cancellations of people who liked their plans anyway. I don’t think this will happen, so it will likely be a net increase of uninsured Americans.
No, the number of insured will increase – already has, in fact. But more important, the new policies are not junk policies; the insurance companies are being held to a higher standard. It is doubtful that overall premium cost will increase – improved coverage is balanced by decreased percentage of the premium going to overhead. But yes, of course, single payer will come.
Take it from a Canadian, single payer is not recommended. See http://www.cihi.ca for the waiting list statistics.
1. 2014 will be the year of bitcoin. The press will be full of stories illustrating, as much as anything else, that almost nobody really groks (understands) it. Despite many predictions to the contrary, it will endure.
5. Most smart watches will flop but one will sell reasonably well. It won’t come from Apple. It probably won’t come from Samsung either. It’ll focus on doing all the little things you take your phone out of your pocket for (including working as a flashlight). The phablet crowd will eat it up. Technophiles and the watch-as-a-status-symbol crowd will follow. Pundits will complain that it’s to bulky.
3. The military/industrial complex will experience an odd hiccup as penalties for storing data with US or UK companies becomes a trend in large cloud computing contracts. This will help South America make inroads in the corporate IT space.
4. The trend to tie every product to “the cloud” will wain as anti-cloud initiatives (spearheaded by the P2P faction) gain traction with savvy users.
2. Stephen Elop will be announced as Steve Balmer’s replacement. He will step down less than 6 months into the job after doggedly being crucified in the press. Microsoft’s board will be painted as clueless for not realizing that trashing Nokia’s future for the sake of windows only makes you look like leadership material to people who work at Microsoft.
We’re approaching the real singularity that will make every current device obsolete: direct access to data from the brain, without sensory input. It may not be in 2014, but it will be sooner than we think.
I suspect that the first breakthrough will be the ability to mentally access and search externally stored text without reading it.
My 2014 predictions:
–
1. Microsoft will name a CEO, but nobody will care because the company hasn’t done anything interesting for over a decade. Their attempts to launch a successful phone will become so desperate, they will actually start callling them project “lead baloon”.
–
2. More companies will adopt software “rental” as the holy grail to raising more revenue. But it won’t work because it will just convince customers that they really needed far fewer licenses.
–
3. Cloud computing will come and go without any vendor making a worthwhile profit.
–
4. Apple will peak in 2014, and without Steve Jobs powerful influence, the bean counters will take over and slowly kill innovation once and for all.
–
5. Democrats will be destroyed in the mid term elections. Most of them won’t want to be associated with Obama, who will quietly retreat into obscurity.
I expect that with 10+ months between now and the 2014 elections, there will be scandals that will have a major impact on their outcome. We’re just not aware of them yet.
And based on the last several years worth of elections, never underestimate the ability of Republicans to shoot themselves in the foot.
Continued:
–
6. Survivalists will once again be shocked to find that nothing major happens. But they are sure next year the world DEFINITELY will come to an end, so you better get those beans and bullets now!!!
–
7. Snowden and his friends in the press will slowly run out of material. By mid year everyone will be weary and the NSA will live on with no real changes.
–
8. The recording industry will begin designing a new, super high fidelity disk format for 4k television. Industry executives will rub their greedy hands together in joy, knowing stupid consumers will have to buy their audio and video collections all over again.
I predict that 90%+ of the predictions here will be way off.
.
Grand predictions for Apple/Amazon/Blackberry(RIM)/Facebook/Google/HP/Intel/Microsoft(/Nokia)/Samsung/Yahoo/etc. always are.
.
Of course, the easy bet, that they’ll all keep doing mostly the same thing that they have been doing, just a bit more and better (Apple/Amazon/Facebook/Google), less and worse (Blackberry/HTC/Microsoft/Nokia/Sony), or either/both depending on your perspective (Dell/HP/Intel/Samsung/Yahoo) isn’t so exciting as a grand prediction, but it matches recent historical trends a lot better.
Your 90% prediction on predictions is the best and likeliest one in all of these comments.
Please do a VoiceOver on your next column. I miss those days you did.
Q4 of 2014, Amazon and Google will use IBM’s OpenPOWER to offer bankingservices to consumers, using Androids and iPhones as selfbanking terminals. (Outlook for IBM z and employment in banks not so good.)
That would be too good to be true. Just like the idea of a single card that can morph itself into any of your credit or loyalty cards. Right now the only way to move a reasonable amount of money from one bank to another is by mailing a check.
I focus on Apple.
Apple will introduce payment ability using fingerprint recognition, so that Iphone will become your defacto credit card (supplemented by iTunes processing).
Apple may (finally) introduce their TV with Siri as an interface (or iphone, for that matter)
Ibeacon enabled mouse + ibeacon enable monitor + ibeacon enable keyboard + 64bit processor (on a mobile phone of some sort…) will be offered as a desktop/laptop replacement.
Since all th eocmponents are on the table it is only a question of time until it reaches the market.
Credit cards are entirely free. I can’t imaging Apple offering to duplicate their function for free.
Credit cards are far from free. Even if you never pay any interest charges, they add a cost to pretty much every sale.
And mailing cheques to move money? Oh wait, you’re in the USA with the daftest banking system in the world. Most of us can do things a bit better.
They are free in the sense that the things you buy cost the same whether you pay with cash now or pay on your next month’s credit card bill. That’s a service I can’t picture Apple offering.
Just curious, how would you move 10,000 dollars (or pounds) from one bank to another for the cost of a stamp, without leaving home?
China will land on the moon. Some news sites will run head lines “China claims the Moon for itself” and “who lost the Moon”. Then it will be reveled to those media agencies that the 1% hate the space program because it impels higher taxes, and that Democrats, still smarting from the “Who lost China meme in the 1950s” will not want to pursue that framing, so the media framing wil.then be changed to “moon not worth having.”
The moon landing will help China improve its technological image and allow it to improve its technology imports.
Uh… China landed a probe on the moon two weeks before you posted this comment. Best to do prediction satire with something that hasn’t happened yet.
China will declare the moon to be an ADIZ.
Rupe
Metal Sintering 3D printers will drop in cost low enough for small business and home gunsmiths to purchase. Government regulates printer raw materials.
Nest acquires Braun brand. Introduces WiFi connected shaver.
NSA and Chinese embedded spyware conflict on Lenovo computers. Chaos ensues.
1. Fukushima isn’t a ‘dead’ story. More to come – and not in a good way.
2. Iran nuclear talks fail. US adds more sanctions, and Iran pushes back by being willing to take Bitcoins as payment for oil.
3. By the end of March/April 2014, the US economy is showing a slowdown which is obvious to all but the most extreme ideologues. The Federal Reserve tries to turn the QE payola back on ‘high’, and both the Tea Party and the Progressive wings of both parties go into open revolt.
4. The NSA domestic spying story is nowhere near finished. There’s going to be a major (huge) rift develop between the tech sector and the NSA, and the tech sector will end up treating this like “SOPA/PIPA, Part 2” because the government will refuse to listen to the damage being caused to the entire technology sector, and the economy. It will end up in Congress, and the NSA will get crushed.
5. ACA will be effectively repealed. Piecemeal. By the Democrats, not the Republicans. It will be the Democratic party’s version of Katrina, only on a much larger scale.
6. Catalonia (Spain) pushes to make a unilateral declaration of independence from Spain at the end of 2014, after talks on a referendum for independence fail.
7. Italy becomes the new ‘Greece’ within the EU, and that pushes the EU to the breaking point.
8. Either an earthquake or a hurricane here in the US, and it’s going to be a big one. The US military will come through, and FEMA will do their usual pitiful job.
A quick reply on FEMA. I live in the midwest area of the USA. This region was hit by a long progression of major floods about 20 years ago in 1993. During this event FEMA and the federal government did a great job and exceeded everyone’s expectations. At lot of the government efforts never made the national news. We have to give credit to then President Clinton. He made a few trips to the region, met with local government leaders, and help expedite things. Again most of this was done outside of the national spotlight. In one amazing Saturday he led a meeting in a high school gym. He brought most of his cabinet and department leaders with him. For several hours they went through a long list of issues, came up with solutions, issued executive orders to get things done. The congressional representatives attended the meeting and took a number of bills back to the congress. It was an amazing day of government performing well.
.
I don’t know what happened to FEMA after Clinton’s watch. Many of the states in the midwest have a mutual-assistance agreement to help with disasters. It is amazing how much help can be mobilized when the need exists. A few days before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast the mutual assistance gang started assembling personnel and equipment to help with the hurricane response. One of the staging areas was only 5 miles from my home. It was an impressive sight. These teams had worked on several floods. They had everything needed to help — and in large quantities. As the storm cleared the coast this army of relief was ready to head down I-55.
.
Then for some strange reason — they were turned away. The State of Louisiana rejected the help and FEMA passed on the bad news. The relief teams disbanded and returned to their home states. Then in the days that followed we watched in horror on TV as the Katrina relief effort fell apart.
.
Having gone through several major floods we KNEW it would take 1-2 years for a community to recover. In that time the residents would need a place to live, jobs, etc. Several charities and faith based organizations combined efforts and secured homes, clothing, furniture, jobs, etc. In a matter of days our community was ready to receive 1000’s of families. Very few came north. Again the local authorities were in denial about the situation and turned away a lot of help.
.
I don’t know if the present administration has done anything to fix FEMA. Having seen first hand massive Katrina relief efforts turned away. I know the State of Louisiana should bear most of the blame for the debacle. FEMA did not perform as well as it should. However if the local state obstructs relief efforts, it limits what FEMA can do.
A few predictions:
.
1) Hackers will exploit the intentionally placed backdoors in software by the NSA and cause problems for security firms. Whether or not Anonymous decides to get involved is roughly a 50/50 chance.
2) Target’s security breach will be the first of many in the upcoming year, refocusing the public’s ire on outsourcing and companies paying for cheap IT.
3) Due to 1 and 2, cloud computing will be the focus of a critical eye from corporations concerned about data security. Despite assurances to the contrary, there will be a significant data breach at one of the big cloud players, throwing a wet blanket on the rush to cloud computing.
4) A push for better IT security will come from banks, who become tired of dealing with angry customers who have had their credit/debit cards hacked.
5) A victim of a crime will sue a major smartphone manufacturer over the ability to be stalked via smartphone.
Things get worse on a bunch of fronts.
Witness:
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554
That will give you pause.
After general overexposure and negative associations with NSA spying, social media will begin to decline. People will rediscover that “meatspace” interactions are way more satisfying.
Linux will increase in popularity and eventually dominate the web hosting and server worlds. People and enterprises will resist the cloud, citing security and privacy concerns, and OpenOffice and LibreOffice will increase in popularity. More enterprises will cut the cord and take their networks off the internet citing security and privacy concerns. More enterprises will insist that all email will be done internally on systems that do not have backdoors, citing security and privacy concerns. Foreign countries and governments will roll out new restrictions on American made operating systems, network software, browsers, internet infrastructure, search engines, email traffic, etc., citing security and privacy concerns. In the next upgrade cycles for many enterprises, American companies will be excluded, citing security and privacy concerns.
Bob,
So sorry to hear about your loss.
Time for healing. My deepest condolence.
take all the time you need, Bob, family and healing count. I pray the Lord welcomed her and will comfort you and yours.
Bob,
Condolences for your loss.
Sorry to hear about your loss, Bob.
So sorry to hear about the passing of your Mom Bob. Prayers to you and your family.
Bob
Condolences for the loss of your mum
Prayers to you and your family.
Condolences Bob. Chin-up, keep on keeping on.
Sorry to hear about your mother, condolences for your loss.
Condolences and respects.
Bob, my condolences to you and your family. I await eagerly your amusing informed assessments of our ramblings and your own insights for the next year.
I am so sorry for your loss, Bob.
Don’t you dare worry about your readers at a time like this.
Dear Bob,
I was very sorry to hear that your mother had passed away.Please accept my condolences for you and all the members of your family.
I hope you are well.
Dale
I’m sure your Mother’s was a life well-lived – there’s joy to to be found in that. And it can take a while to wrap your mind around becoming an orphan so don’t rush back to work. Your predictions column can wait.
Bob,
I am really sorry to hear about your loss.
I have no predictions for 2014, either.
However, what got me thinking much lately is the following short presentation by Google employee Mike Hearn, Bitcoin Developer – Turing Festival 2013 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu4PAMFPo5Y – more like predictions for 2050!
The highlights are that we will use autonomous agents (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_agent, http://matternet.us/our-vision/) as taxis and all jobs will be killed except for some creative ones. I don’t know how it coincides with recent developments in Switzerland about the referendum on an unconditional basic income (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/switzerlands-proposal-to-pay-people-for-being-alive.html)?
Anyways, Mike’s talk is influenced by Marshall Brain’s (founder of HowStuffWorks) short story, Manna (https://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm) which I haven’t read yet.
I am truly interested in what the economist in you have to say on all this.
Always sad to lose one so close, yet a joy you had her so long. Love to you from the tech community, we’re glad to still have you.
Bob the pain gets better after a while. After a while longer you finally realize she never really left. Best wishes to you and yours, keep the columns coming, work will be a welcome distraction and there’s no harm done in taking periodic breaks from being miserable to be funny or to grow workwise, it’s what keeps a man sane through the tough times. Best to avoid making major financial or otherwise life-altering decisions this year if you can. Happy new year and hang in there man!
Sorry to hear about your loss Bob. My condolences to you and your family.
Sorry for your loss.
One of your previous predictions may be coming true:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/01/03/analyst-predicts-apple-will-transform-notebook-market-with-12-inch-hybrid-ipad-pro-this-fall
I cannot help wondering about the fallout from the NSA catastrophe. I know I will be considering software/hardware with a bias towards security. I don’t want the NSA spying/penetrating my computers. Frankly, the game is on for everyone else to use those exploits. Open source hardware (open source bios/firmware….) makes a lot of sense.
A good introduction to NSA hacks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA
Sorry about your loss Bob. Very glad to see you have kept your sense of humour, in times like this, the ability to laugh is sometimes the only thing that keeps you going.
So sorry to hear about your losses, Bob. Sending warm thoughts your way.
BOB !!!
.
No work for you this weekend and next week. You deserve and probably need some quality time with your family. I am sure most of my fellow readers of your column will agree — take some time off. Take as much time as you need. We’re not going anywhere. We’ll be here when you get back.
.
You have our condolences, prayers, and best wishes.
I am sorry to read of your loss!
This isn’t a prediction, but more of a hope!
Robert X Cringely will sign a deal with a public broadcaster to create the next episodes of the very popular Nerd series. Hopefully a 3, 4 or more part TV series covering from where Nerds 2.0.1 left off to now. Talk about the rise & fall of Novell with Microsoft finally gaining ground in the server market. Then how open source started to take over with the evolution of RedHat, VA Linux Systems etc. Where SUN made it too, then was absorbed by Oracle. The rise in popularity of virtualization. How the Internet evolved, how all major telcos became ISP’s while AOL became less popular. How we advanced from Dial-up, to DSL & cable to now some areas getting Fibre to the home. The story of excite & yahoo & where they are now compared to (& cover the rise of) Google. Apples almost fail then rise to victory over the personal computing market with the return of Jobs, then cover the loss of Jobs. Dell going public, then recently returning to private & where is HP at these days?
I could go on, but I think everyone gets the picture. I have copies of your previous Nerds series that I bough so many years ago when I was a teenager & had a passion for computer history. I still do & I’m looking forward to sharing all the content I’ve collected over the years with my now 9 month year old son who has already taken a keen interest in computers! 🙂
Thanks,
Ricki
Sincere condolences Bob. May your mother rest in peace, and nothing but the happiest memories live on for you.
So sorry to hear of your loss. I’m sure she is a remarkable woman to create a son like you.
Sincerely, long time reader, first time poster
Various pundits and bloggers will continue predict and post about Bitcoin bubbles and bitcoin’s eventual demise (which fails to manifest) while unknowingly paying for the massive fallouts and liabilities associated with traditional commerce mediums. More Target-like breaches will hit the media.
http://techzeppelin.blogspot.com/
Oh the techmanity
My condolences on the loss of your mother.
To be honest, I’d just as soon you write about her as any tech predictions. Knowing you only from afar and through your writings, I dare say she must have been an interesting person.
Another long time reader and first time poster. Bob, my condolences to you and your family. Please, if you must write, let it be for theraputic reasons. We’ll look forward to seeing you back in harness, but only at a time that’s right for you.
Our condolences to you and your family for the difficult time you may be going through. All the best. From Accra, Ghana.
I’m really sorry to hear about your mother.
Can’t even imagine what it’s like.
All I can do is offer my condolences.
Hi Bob,
So sorry to hear about your Mom. Just went through the same thing. Our Mom was the same age (89). RIP.
Condolences Bob.
That totally sucks.
Bob,
Sorry to hear about your mom. And the taxes.
Tipping point of content. It is unlikely you haven’t heard a gripe regarding the content Netflix offers. Mostly, B titles and films / series of yesteryear. ( of course with a few exceptions ) Netflix has heard this as well. Enter “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black”.
This is the year of I(P) La Carte TV. We are yet to see a truly disruptive IP based TV service. Many have tried, and some have had some success, depending on your personal definition of. Most would agree the biggest problem is the old school networks that are extremely comfortable with their current business models. But they own the content, so have the leverage. How do you solve this problem? The technology is lying in wait, it’s is the content people want. Solution, create your own content. Netflix and Amazon have figured this out. I believe we will see a few more significant players follow suit, and / or Netflix and Amazon will double down on their efforts. Then the battle front will shift to the eyeballs, along with the leverage. This is where Amazon / Netflix have the advantage. The content castles will begin to crumble.
About those 4k screens… I read recently that their price is dropping faster than any consumer electronics in recent history. Problem is perceived to be that “there’s no content”, and everyone from Hollywood to TV and cable networks to Netflix is scrambling to upgrade their gear.
Seems to me that there’s a potential tipping point here of some sort. Maybe there are better things to do with a 4k screen than watch more same-old, same-old Hollywood content on it. I know I’d be happier to have a single 50 inch or so screen on my desktop than the current two or three 20 inch ones. Today I could stick a 50 inch TV on the desk (or more likely on the wall behind it), but it would still be only 1080p (or whatever terminology you like). If I could get a 4k 50 incher for almost the price of two decent 20 inchers, I’d do it tomorrow, and not worry about whether there’s any entertainment to watch.
Well sure, I’m just an old-school Windows guy who likes lots of screen real estate. But there’s got to be something here that doesn’t involve Hollywood…
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2084966/dells-28-inch-4k-desktop-monitor-will-only-cost-700.html
Adobe’s model (at least for Acrobat Reader) was to alternate on subsequent revisions between multiple document and single document modes, with no way to swith between them within a revision. I am so glad they settled on single document mode because I hate hate hate having multiple documents in the same parent window.