The Cringelys are back from Christmas in Hawaii and so I’m back to work. Alaska Airlines changed our flight to Kona in August but either never told Orbitz or Orbitz wasn’t listening so we got to the San Jose Airport 3.5 hours earlier than we needed to, having left Santa Rosa at 2AM. Note the tired eyes. Note, too, the rubber ducky the kids found as part of an airport promotion. Not only did they get $10 worth of candy, they won the grand prize GoPro camera!
It’s time for my annual predictions for the new year, which I’ll publish I suppose on Friday. So if you have any wacky ideas please throw them into the comments, below. Somehow reader ideas rarely make it into my list but then I’m weird. And I think having a broader point of view really helps the discussion, so please comment.
We’re on the threshold, I believe, of an amazing burst of computing creativity. This is an industry where there are far more Good New Days than Good Old Days and I have several of those to write about on Friday. I’m guessing you do, too. I’m eager to read what you have to share.
Deep Learning has to be in there somewhere. It’s poised to become the next big thing.
All so called innovation since the turn of the century has been either a video game, or a better way to spy on us in order to market to us.
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Is there really anything useful? I’m still using email, chat and office apps that barely changed except for UI tweaks. Actually, they’re not all that better/different since the early 80s and DOS apps. I do enjoy having a library at my fingertips or driving directions. Those certainly aren’t anything new.
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The devices are just smaller and more portable. Nothing new there either. That’s been the trend since the first building-sized computers in the 50s.
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Sales of IBM’s Power servers continues to plummet (Europe, Russia, China all in recession and USA customers migrating off of big iron) but IBM doesn’t care as they are focused on the cloud. More layoffs in their legacy business. 2015 same as 2014.
Oculus Rift as the next Black Swan. I don’t mind if gamers use it too, but I’m looking forward to diving the Great Barrier Reef and climbing Mt. Everest.
Oculus will take over right after Google Glass.
A billion to one!
Google’s $3 Cardboard has/will steal the thunder from Facebooks $3B Oculus Rift purchase.
Reasons why occasional VR use on a phone might outweigh market for dedicated device:
– phones available on contract. Oculus Rift not.
– VR isn’t healthy nor comfortable for long viewing times – partially due to physiological factors
Predictions:
– Oculus Rift has licensed their brand (and some tech) to Samsung… others? do they have a choice?
– a killer-app for 6″ super-res phones! Cell manufacturers will welcome and address this new demand.
– VR will drive a high-end segment of the cell phone market with purpose-built low-latency interfaces.
– Dedicated devices will spawn from cell-phone market technology.
( in a way this has already happened.. Oculus Rift uses tech driven by the cell phone market… Samsung phone screens )
oh yeah, hmm… and porn, lots of porn… the black swan needs porn in order to become a commercial success.
Uber becomes the next Webvan, Pets.com, etc…
Uber becomes the next Enron
Will Apple buy some Sony businesses? Maybe the motion picture division that just got hung out in the wind.
You can get a lot of computer for $50 these days. The Banana Pi, for example, is a $55 single-board computer with an Allwinner A20 dual-core 1GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM. Also, Twitter and Facebook are starting to turn on their users, and certainly the USA’s imperial presence is starting to reek of three-day-old fish, as Ben Franklin put it. Will this be the year public server home appliances appear and individuals start repatriating their private data from the public cloud?
As safer system languages languages like Rust begin to gain mindshare, a major crypto library will be rewritten in one to eliminate forever the possibility of off-by-1 errors, buffer overflows, buffer underflows, integer overflows, etc. thereby shrinking the “attack surface” exposed to hackers (government sponsored or otherwise).
In response, the US will add new and more onerous export restrictions on crypto software and/or other similar useless restrictions.
system-safe languages and frameworks *should* already be de rigeur – but I hope things like Rust do make it better
Tim Cook shocks Wall Street when caught antiquing in Napa Valley.
Since everyone knows, wouldn’t it be more surprising if he weren’t?
You mean like using an iPhone 1 with a corkscrew?
Prediction: Tim Cook’s sexuality will be mainly a non-issue, except to those who have been empowered by his candor, or to those who think thinly veiled homophobic comments are at all funny.
Kudos for your beautiful family !!!
My best wishes for 2015 to you all !!!
(I know what I will do … raspberry pi C programs to start with, and keep going with projects in PHP, no more Java in my horizon … in all, good perspective … I’m happy so far …)
1. Recognition of the obvious, the death of: AIX, HP-UX, SUN Solaris
2. IBM buys/merges with SAP – IBM desperately needs a solutions business to compete with Oracle
3. One or more major banks move their system of record processing off IBM’s mainframes
…off IBM’s mainframes…and on to dead trees. (Bob did ask for wacky.)
Mainframes aren’t going anywhere – they’re going to *increase* in sales and footprint
Samsung and Xiaomi sue each other for copying when they ship identical iPad Pro knockoffs on the same day each priced at $499.99.
; )
IoT is still and remains NOT the next big thing in 2015.
SSD costs less than spinning disk for 500Gb and less.
– This was Radio Shack’s last Christmas. Perhaps they made enough cash to pay some of their lease early-termination fees. End of an era.
– Best Buy rents out more of their floor space as store-within-a-stores. I predict it’ll be Samsung: at first their phones + tablets, and later their home appliances.
The Samsung Experience is already built in Best Buy stores. you want wacky, I’ll give you wacky, Cringe… Heathkit Emporiums in Best Buy. that’s two, two, two wackies in one.
Oil prices sink to $40.00 a barrel. Most shale exploration stops. Sony hack turns out to be an inside job. Satellite based plane tracking system mandated for all oceanic flights. Greece and other debtor countries defect from EU. Hillary Clinton decides to run, Jeb Bush decides to run. Both are defeated in the primaries.by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rand Paul respectively. DJIA hits 19,500 before it corrects down to 15,000 right after the 2016 election. Samsung buys Sony’s electronic business. Disney buy Sony’s media business. HP hardware business eventually bought by Chinese company.
Disney and Sony is market dominance, the feds won’t allow it. now, Apple or Dish or Direct TV, that is possible… only Apple has the cash. this is why you don’t yield to greenmailers when they slide under the doorframe…
Only Greece will leave the EU.
In 2015, I predict I will be reading your column and watching to see what is next. I think everyone already agrees that business software functionality is a commodity already. Everything is built now so I am moving it OUT of the server rooms and adding value for the business by streamlining all aspects of every workflow I can find. Of course, the company will need ‘stuff’ but that ‘stuff’ exists somewhere and I will not build it more than likely – I will ‘rent’ it from someone that already built a better one.
Data scientists are here. We have positions in our company where good data scientists can make a living. Predictive analysis – what will happen tomorrow? A good data scientist might be able to predict the future if he has enough accurate data.
Best wishes to you from the east coast. I hope to see you soon – before someone dies!!!!!
RAN
A long time ago you wrote about making cheap solar panels. If not a prediction I would love to see an update about that.
Tesla is building a huge battery factory where some of the capacity will be targeted at power storage. While primarily for Solar City it will also be sold to other companies from what I understand. Cheap panels could play into this at some point. Perhaps more like 2017 than 2015 however.
– North Korea turn out to have had nothing to do with Great Sony Hack of 2014, despite all the razzmatazz and the POTUS saying otherwise. Also, as part of this, Sony get caught out releasing some information themselves for bargaining/loss damage reasons, Some of the low-level people involved in the hacking get rounded up. Nobody wins and the film still turns out to be awful.
– Goodbye Radio Shack (not a surprise but still a shame – I loved the trash eighty TRS-80)
– The internet of things turns out to be an internet of duds and the phrase burns brightly at the start of the year and becomes the instant death word towards the latter part of 2015. Online courses and ebooks about the Internet Of Things spread across our inboxes like butter on an Arizona rooftop.
– Windows 10 comes out. Then an update. Then an update to fix the update. Internet Explorer is consigned to the great recycle bin in the sky (to be fair, MS have already announced as much). Yet loads of people still carry on using Windows XP and corporate boardrooms insist the company websites and software “need to support IE and XP people still use them”.
– Richard Stallman starts to look more and more sane after more details are revealed about the extent of government X installing component Y silently into [insert name of widely used piece of hardware here]. Despite this Mr Stallman doesn’t find out since his aging laptop running the only remaining ‘free as in freedom’ software packs up working mid-January and he is finally forced to send messages hand-written with a quill on home-made paper.
> North Korea turn out to have had nothing to do with Great Sony Hack of 2014,
Under the heading of “never believe anything until it’s been officially denied”: as soon as the FBI et al said North Korea was behind it you knew it wasn’t them and was definitely someone else. I can’t believe so many were so gullible.
We will all have 8 core laptops, but windows will still run like a dog and bluescreen.
-Bill Gates
-internet.org
-whitebox switching
-Cisco’s fall from grace
-CDN
-new mobile
-inet of everything
-smart connected
-VR
An NSA hack brings down a major bank.
I was thinking something similar, but in my opinion it won’t be this but rather a private/organized crime hacking group breaks into a major international investment bank (Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Barclays) and wreaks havoc.
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Hmm, now that I think about it, North Korea’s hackers might go after one of the major banks in retaliation for The Interview being released online and at independent theaters.
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I suspect that once an investment bank or a major hedge fund gets hacked, major companies will finally start to pay more than lip service to IT security.
I think this year will be the year a major security issue/breach will cause a major outage/bankruptcy/war/stock market drop/?????
Healthcare begins to fall apart due to the continued use of MUMPS, the 1968 era language set used by the VA and most of the largest hospitals in America.
MUMPS has about 6,000 installations in the healthcare community.
A backlash against smart phones / devices as people begin to realize how deeply addicted to them they are (I certainly am). If that prediction fails a prediction for 20 years from now: humanity becomes a parasite living off the collective intelligence of all interconnected computing devices.
1) Microsoft increases its mindshare in the IT market by continuing to open-source and port the C# ecosystem. They cash on this renewed goodwill to push their products (Azure, etc) onto their new “customers”.
2) Networking: While manufacturers continue to build upon the SDN (Software Defined Networking) hype, people slowly start acknowledging that SDN as initially envisioned will never hit the enterprise market. The rare players who need SDN — Google, Facebook, and the such — have sufficient brainpower to come up with their own solution anyway, as they have demonstrated in the past. Enterprise customer don’t want or need SDN anyway. They do want, however, better management and monitoring tools; and startups spring up around the notion. In particular, they target older hardware and more modest deployments: the Cisco solution to the problem, called ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) forces you to use new routers, and only works with 40Gbps ports.
3) Javascript continue its ascension to the pantheon of successful computer languages, and new framework/library/applications that were a killer app of other languages are ported to Javascript. Long shot: multi-threaded Javascript?
4) The iWatch sells well (because it’s made by Apple), but not enough (because it’s made by Apple), shares continue to drop.
5) The Oculus Rift sees its first applications. My pronostic is that those will be “cool, but ultimately disappointing”, kind of like the Wii. Success will depend on wether the Oculus finds its own Wii Sport (one of the OP’s comment on virtual tourism is judicious in that regard).
Ginni will be gone by the end of 2015. Has to be. That IBM ship is sinking and the board will have to fire the Captain. Makes no sense trying to steer that monster in another direction with a captain that kept the course head-on that “very” visible iceberg. Can’t argue that the fog hid it!
Huge fan of your predictions column. I have no answers, only questions.
1. Will IBM finally bury itself into oblivion?
2. Will BlackBerry finally bury itself into oblivion?
3. Will Apple finally announce their new platform where the iPhone IS the computer as you predicted and what impact will that have? Will their partnership with IBM leverage them into the enterprise space once and for all?
4. What’s the deal with all these internet companies producing their own TV shows. How long can that go on?
5. With Microsoft’s new CEO clearly paving the way for an all new MSFT, what’s next for them?
6. Security is clearing moving to the front page with Sony, Target, Snowden, et al. What’s next?
7. Will Google continue to innovate? They are clearly slowing down.
8. How will Facebook stay relevant beyond just big purchases?
9. What’s behind Amazon’s echo product? What is their larger strategy here? They appear to be innovating more than anyone else out there.
I agree the Amazon Echo is likely the most interesting product of 2015 and I also predict that Apple, Google and Microsoft will copy it. (See my own predictions at https://www.pdxmobile.com/?p=31408)
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My take on the Echo is that it will evolve into the master of home automation systems, starting with your home entertainment center. A voice interface is more natural to most people than touch or click.
Re: “A voice interface is more natural to most people than touch or click.” More natural doesn’t mean better. OK if you’re all alone but if anyone else is around it’s very disturbing.
Never work if there’s noise/music around. FAIL.
I correct typing mistakes by typing. Meanwhile, I correct voice mistakes by… typing.
Maybe in 2015 someone big will finally take a shot at conversational-style corrections during voice input.
Nah, that’s like 2030 stuff.
not exactly “predictions” … but some of those questions are interesting
Self driving cars are already being delivered in the form of Mercedes and other brands (ie: Tesla)vehicles with variable speed / distance cruise control and lane holding capability.
Auto companies will never claim the ability because to much liability is at stake, but drivers will figure it out on the interstate system.
I have an Infinity with intellegent Cruise Control and lane tracking. I can almost take a nap on my daily commute
Mainframe2 is our future.
Along with broadcast2.0 and “virtual” circuit switching.
I think a major company (probaby Apple) will start to extend “wearable” technology to in-ear devices. I use a “made for iPhone” hearing aids from Resound. Besides being great hearing aids, they let me (via a small adapter) have TV audio sent right to my ears, send sound (phone calls, audiobooks) from my iphone straight to my ears, and let me adjust the hearing aid settings from my iPhone. At a reasonable price, this technology would be useful to all, especially when coupled with smart phone software that whispers in your ear to notify you of important updates during the day. Unlike the Google Glass, in-ear technology is all but invisible and not intrusive or geeky. If the in-ear devices could detect nods and shakes, they could also provide a useful input device for phones and computers (beyond voice and multitouch, communicate with your device by shaking or nodding your head).
1.Hydrogen cars begin to sell in CA. Big push to get H pump infrastructure nationwide.
2.Internet of things begin to be seen as botnet of things. People try disconnecting their fridges.
3.Nielson tries to research web traffic ratings or face obsolescence.
1. HP turns its focus to eating IBM’s customer base. HP sales people will get assessed on how many IBM customers they have sold to.
2. The death of servers for small businesses. Increasing numbers of small-to-medium businesses simply won’t have any internal server infrastructure. Laptops get replaced by ipads and chromebooks.
3. Tying into #2, ActiveDirectory begins a slow ossification as only large enterprises will be needing it.
4. There will be more widening in the gap between the two speeds of technology. On the one hand, there will be large enterprises proposing five year plans for how they could remove one minor Cobol application off a mainframe and rewrite it in Java to put it onto a virtualised x86 server (with no new features). On the other hand, consumers will be expecting a new release of their favourite apps every few weeks, expecting more and more AI (in particular image recognition) and expecting their apps to “just know” what it needs to do.
Sadly, AD will never go away – and not just because enterprises need/use it: it’s one of the best implementations of LDAP out there (yeah, I know, not a popular thing to say, but it’s true).
When AD, FreeIPA, and the like *ALSO* get OpenID-like services, there can be a true SSO-everywhere system
We will see the first broadly popularized call for the implementation of a Constitutional amendment enshrining the Right to Privacy by a significant, yet destined to fail presidential candidate. Like the candidate, the effort will fail, but the seeds for such an ammendment will be sown and will rise again in 2024.
4th amendment already does that. Problem is the whole constitution is intentionally ignored now.
Applications that use ipv6 effectively such as webrtc will start to be used more heavily, and transparently, with most people not even noticing the change.
i) Clojure cracks into the “Top 10” of programming languages.
ii) As MS pivots harder to cloud services, corporations ween off machine image deployment via SCCM.
iii) Everyone and their cousin either is enrolled in or runs a web programming boot-camp (much like the MCSE Cert. craze of the mid-90’s).
Wow. I think it was 1998 that in an email I assessed your accuracy up to the 6 month mark (in the end you got to 7/10 that year). More than 15 years…
I thought you said last year you were done with predictions, no?
He was wrong on that prediction. 🙂
>> Greece and other debtor countries defect from EU
You probably mean the Eurozone rather than the EU. Similar, but not the same thing.
I second the self-driving vehicle comment above. It will happen for commercial/industrial fleets first, with the general population market following much later.
Also, we’ll continue to see automation improving and making workers more productive, business owners wealthier, and implicitly driving unemployment. This will affect people up and down the wage chain, not just Amazon fulfillment workers. 2015 is likely too early for any sort of breaking point, but within 10 years we’ll have a serious unemployment problem on our hands (just in time to really screw my kids and yours). CGP Grey did a nice, concise video about this on YouTube, if you’re interested (look for “Humans Need Not Apply”).
We finally develop a computer that is capable of writing programs so that we finally put an end to the STEM wars that pit citizens against immigrants
Warren Buffet will wake up one morning, have an epiphany, call Becky Quick on CNBC for a quickly manufactured interview and finally announce that he REALLY doesn’t understand technology and his IBM position was a big mistake. By that time, IBM will be well below $100/shr due to continued revenue and profit declines. Ginni and her henchmen will be toast and maybe, just maybe, someone will come in and cleanup the ruthless gang of visionless corporate politicians that call themselves IBM executives. Sadly, by then it may be too late for Big Blue but nevertheless it will be fun to watch. Maybe they can ask Watson for advice.
“I can’t do that, Ginny…”
“Maybe they can ask Watson for advice.”
… Except that IBM management will be confused by the response, due to Watson’s insistence on providing its answer in the form of a question.
People will realize the cult of Apple is insane and stop overpaying for a commodity.
While I’d love to see prices on Apple devices come down just as much as the next guy, the Cult Of Apple will only expand
An infrastructure hack will cause a major lights-out event in the USA, we (the US gov) retaliate and virtual world war 1 (vWW1) begins.
Digital Single Lens Reflex Cameras (DSLR) will finally go the way of the Dodo bird as Canon and Nikon FINALLY come out with mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras (MILC) that have the specs necessary to displace the DSLR’s in their inventory. Already beaten to the punch by Sony, Olympus, Panasonic and Fujifilm, the MILC’s from Canon and Nikon so far have been less than spectacular and poorly received by professionals. The evolution of the electronic viewfinder (EVF) and live-view have matured to the point that the optical viewfinder is just no longer necessary.
However, the use of smartphone cameras continues to escalate leaving the digital compact camera market as a losing proposition for all but the biggest manufacturers. I predict one of the big camera makers will exit the scene, probably Olympus.
Note: anyone know how to view the comments on Bob’s Forbes page???
Try https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertcringely/feed/
That is a good list of articles, but it’s hard to find any comments either there or on the Forbes website links provided. It’s easy to make a comment also, except that no one, including the author, will ever see it published below the article, even using the comments link provided. I suspect we’ll have to settle for reading Bob’s column via the feed link you provided, and then leave comments on cringely.com 🙂
I agree that we’ll finally see good mirrorless cameras from Nikon and probably, though not for certain, Canon in 2015. I also agree that mirrorless cameras are the future for professional photography. The whole question for pros revolves around lenses. Will those new mirrorless cameras be compatible with the old mounts for the big investment you have in glass? That’s what I’m wondering. Will my legacy Nikon lenses work on a new Nikon mirrorless camera?
You need to do a further sequel to Triumph of the Nerds and Nerds 2.0.1.
A lot has happened since then.
M
IBM pairs with a health insurer to go into healthcare consulting in a big way.
That’s, perhaps, the scariest thought on this whole page ….
Thanks to Edward Snowdon and the NSA, there will be a huge rise in the sales of:
– typewriters
– paper
– computer equipment which CANNOT be equipped with network devices or removable memory (i.e. air gap only)
In January, IBM will announce earnings that are inline with the past 10 quarters….ie 10-20% decline. Stock drops significantly in the next couple of days, to well below $150 maybe even as low as $135. Cuts are already planned, but news about them won’t be announced as is typical. If the stock drops below $130, look for a new CEO announcement before the end of Q1. More cuts to follow as well as the start of mass ship jumping.
A new round of deep and draconian cuts are already in the works at IBM. The effect on IBM’s existing customers will be profound. Management will cling to their CAMSS and EPS plans, ignoring the fact the rate of business loss is much greater than the new CAMSS business.
The CSS for cringely.com will add a space after paragraphs in comments.
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So that we no longer have to use a period for white space.
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Happy 2015.
+1
How about TWO columns? Your predictions and your take on the best reader-submitted items. Cheers!
why would you go all the way to San Jose from Santa Rosa?
Cheap airfare. And it gave them more quality time riding together in the family car.
Desktop Photonic Computing will revolutionize the world — particularly that of GEC (Genetically Engineered Computational Designs) by allowing small machines (desktop machines) to do the same work as large super computers. Possibly faster evolution cycles than existing super computers to evolve engineering designs on the desktops of thousands of engineers. A Major! step forward. CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analysis just got a whole lot better and easier.
Microsoft admits it is out of ideas for Microsoft Office and will no longer be releasing new versions. The very next MS press release says it will only be offering Office 365 as a means to deliver new features to users faster.
There’ve been new features added to Office? When? I haven’t noticed anything different (other than the ribbon) since Office 2000.
The rise of the interactive novel. Not quite a game, not quite literature, but with tablets, smart phones and e-readers, I think we have the platforms to support the coffee-table book of our age.
Apple and Google (not sure who will go first) then Amazon then Microsoft then Yahoo then Samsung will buy media companies. They need to get a monopoly on music movies and TV shows and books to keep their ecosystems moving forward.
Microsoft 3D will use the webcam to scan for 3D printing and CAD/CAM. the only problem is nobody has touch screens and the turntable over the keyboard makes control impossible. but they sell 500,000 at $45 each, so hey, it’s your problem, customer.
Microsoft makes even more of its source code open source. No-one laughs.
Google Labs develops Direct Neural Interfacing, with 10 pinpoints in the bows of a Google Glass set. the research department is decimated when they accidentally blink into the Urban Dictionary and their heads blow up.
– Huawei buys HP to compete with Lenovo internationally
– Marissa Mayer is replaced as CEO from Yahoo. The next CEO is tasked with splitting and selling the company in several parts.
– ChromeOS merges with Android, becoming a stronger alternative for Windows
– Passwords finally start to be replaced by better alternatives.
Re Passwords: https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm
This one is backed by Microsoft and Google:
http://fidoalliance.org/
After hearing Steve’s presentation, the fido guy was very impressed. Steve plans to make his solution free and open source for any website to use. They can even use it as a parallel alternative to any other method.
I agree – if Yahoo! is intact at the beginning of 2016, I’ll be very surprised.
HP’s non-enterprise side being bought-out makes sense … but only to get the printer patents
By the year 2030, the Super Intelligent Computer King (SICK) will be in control of all technology and other human activities. It will soon discover that most crime, environmental destruction, unemployment, wars, and related problems result from actions and inactions of The Powers That Be (TPTB). Therefore, SICK will order the immediate execution of all active members of TPTB. and the sterilization of all remaining family members. Then it will modify all existing and future technology to serve the interests of a peaceful and productive human race. A new Golden Age will be upon us.
Skynet by any other name.
The difference being that in my scenario the head computer was portrayed as the good guy.
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You also might consider my scenario to be a SICK joke.
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But then again, who can you really trust in a position of great power? No one that I know.
You can trust *ME* in a position of great power.
No, really. I mean it!
The NSA already does that, and they control the power elite thru blackmail. What else would you do with all electronic communications at your fingertips?
I was wondering what happened to Bob . . . .
What was your batting average on last year’s predictions ?
There is a lot of creativity in computing, but I don’t see Google or Apple or Microsoft or IBM doing better going forward.
We need new disruptive ideas and companies to stir the pot and start the new cycle.
Amazon will report a profit!
Year of Linux desktop!
There will never be a “year of the linux desktop” – and I explain why here: http://antipaucity.com/2013/06/04/this-is-not-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop/#.VK1thYrF8Xc
Apple will open source iOS!
Google will be evil!
Already is!
Bill Gates returns as CEO of Microsoft!
NostrilDrippus Predicts! ™ black-and-white TV makes a comeback on the HD widescreen. now you can see what the real June Cleaver would have looked like two kids and 80 pounds later.
That’s about as likely as a resurgence of vinyl records and turntables…uh oh…wait a minute.
Black & White isn’t, not really. It’s varying levels of gray.
I do see B&W shows making a comeback – one of the most powerful aspects of the original Twilight Zone was not the writing, nor the acting, nor the narration: it was that because the show was not in color, you couldn’t be distracted by the sets, the clothes, etc.
Everything was in shades of gray, which made the stories resonate not only then, but now.
IBM will offload the rest of the hardware and service businesses, and concentrate on vaporware and service fees. ROI will skyrocket with nobody but C-levels and subcontracted media relations outfits to pay, and the stock will stabilize at $30.
Convergence: VR will combine with instrumentation. Google Glass/Oculus Rift/ and some Me to Microsoft offering will combine smartphone/band/GPS/VR technologies to provided “blended” experiences. For example Geo-caching with online/VR/personal fitness elements.
Health Care: attempts to increase medical records portability will create Big IT solutions that fail big with huge personal information failures. Someone will integrate personal Band data with Public health information enabling individual health management.
3-D printing: DCMA will attempt to “manage” 3-D printing technology. More big players will enter the 3-D printing market.
Intel will launch a product strategy to take on ARM. Oracle will announce losses. As mentioned above, Microsoft will launch a VR visualization product. Patent trolls will shift to greener pastures: ADA compliance, etc. HP and/or IBM will be Publicly hacked with the assistance of disgruntled insiders. Snowden-style leaking will replace more conventional whistle-blowing, with a major leak probably from the DHS. Tech salaries will continue to stagnate and hopefully H1(b) visa’s will become a Presidential campaign issue.
Oracle does not announce losses. Oracle responds to questions with “Uhhh, he’s out sailing.”
More companies will start to realize that using IBM case studies, to justify some method that upper management can (yet again) knee cap IT, is a bad idea.
Announcement of Google Fiber Havana
Tampa Bay Rays announce move to Havana, start sports network
Apple Pay (or similar product) ring and/or keychain
National ID card bill passes in House
Will the 2015 be the decline of the tablet market?
Why bringing a 7″ or a 10″ tablet (as an extra device) when your pocket can still fit a 5″ or 6″ phablet?
Will the 2015 the decline of the (unborn) smartwatch market?
Smartwatches are expensive toys from the average user point of view.
They need to accommodate a SIM, be able to use and external “display” and have a battery that can last as long as a smart phone (in the range between 24 and 48 hours) can.
Only then they will be able to steal room in the mobile market.
Mobile payments. Won’t happen yet.
Electronic credit/debit cards just work fine. And we also have pre-paid/rechargeable ones too, just in case.
Apple and Google need first to sign big deals with banks and/or card issuers.
All the above stuff is “my own humble opinion”(tm) and also show some geographical bias as I am European and those things could sound weird to Americans.
All this said, my best wishes to all of the Cringelys!
My prediction for 2015 is that almost all predictions for 2015 will be wrong.
Sony Corp. cleans house with the management teams of its US businesses. One of Sony’s start-up bets (the e-ink watch, smart locks etc) comes good. Sony will still be supported by its Japanese financial services business.
For years IBM has charged Huawei a fortune for consulting, telling Huawei the IBM way. In 2015, I could see the student becoming the master as Huawei sells into IBM enterprise markets in the developing world
Shareholder activists don’t take a run at Google.
I would be surprised if we didn’t see some devices trying to power themselves by scrounging energy from wider electromagnetic spectrum (wi-fi networks, cellular devices, radio, TV etc).
I was doing that in the 60s. Tune in a local radio station to power a one transistor amplifier to provide gain for a weaker station. If it were practical, we would not have the battery life problem we currently have on all devices with screens.
Despite The Interview, Hollywood still won’t do cinema / digital simultaneous releases, or global simultaneous releases for any content that wouldn’t have been direct to TV/video in an earlier age.
The Cyanogen distribution of Android won’t go anywhere fast due to its geographic exclusivity agreements with the likes of OnePlus and MicroMax cramping the style of handset manufacturers with global ambitions
We’re likely to see European states take a similar stance to India and China and more widely blocking sites for security considerations and media IP enforcement. Expect the UK and Australia to lead the way in terms of site censorship.
The reason, a difference in values between EU and US: privacy is our freedom of speech. A secondary reason is that the MPAA are exceptionally good lobbyists (well that and the State Department shill for them like its going out of style).
I predict 2015 will be rough on some retail businesses. Sears, K-Mart, Radio Shack, and Best Buy will finish 2015 as much smaller businesses than at the beginning of the year. Amazon will (and has been) picking up the slack as stores close. At some point retail needs to wake up and realize Amazon is not the CAUSE of their problems, but rather the RESULT of them. These firms have failed to adjust to the market and innovate for a decade.
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We will continue to insert “.” to create paragraph breaks in Bob’s comment section.
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I predict (actually I hope) in 2015 society realizes our telephone systems and the Internet has become a super highway for crime, and we’ll finally start taking action to protect our homes, or money, and our personal lives.
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Technology like Mainframe2 will lead to large scale TV programming services. A firm (or firms) will step into the market with a service that will compete with the satellite and cable providers. All we will need is a simple hdmi device (eg Roku stick or Chromecast).
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The US Government will fail to recognize the low oil prices are the result of energy independence, and this is a very good thing for the US economy. As US consumers spend less money on energy and more money on other goods and services, it will be good for economies all over the world. The US Government will do something stupid which will lead to greater energy dependence, higher prices, and mess up the economic recovery all over the world.
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Google will combine its concept of self driving cars with an Uber like on-demand driving service, and come up with something revolutionary. Dense metropolitan areas like Manhattan could become car-free in a few years. Imagine an integrated transportation system that can serve all local travel needs for NYC residents!
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Microsoft will finally unleash its creative talent. They will finally realize the operating system on a phone is much less important than the applications that run on it. Microsoft will embrace Android and coexist with it in a big way. Windows will become free, or at least a lot cheaper. Microsoft will develop an operating system and browser that will compete directly with Chrome OS. Microsoft will then become a major cloud and application as a service provider.
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It will be a brutal year for IBM employees, customers, and shareholders. IBM will start 2015 with big cuts and a renewed effort to shove all work to cheap labor markets. Their offshore delivery centers are under staffed, under skilled, and can’t retain good talent. The impact to IBM’s customers will be immediate and considerable. We’ve watched major companies suffer big time from cyber attacks. In 2015 we will see a few IBM customers suffer very public problems from IBM’s poor service. As in cyber attacks, after a few public incidents companies will start sharing notes. The full scope of IBM’s “screw our customers” business plan will become painfully obvious.
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More later…
So let us know when you sell IBM stock short, so we can all get on board at the right time.
Sears/K-Mart will be half its size or in bankruptcy going to extinction in the next year.
When was the last time microsoft added a new feature to windows or office? 2015 WILL NOT be the year when people realize they are paying over and over again for a slightly tweaked UI. Vinyl to DAT to laser disk to cd to dvd… and on and on. Content the same.
2015 will be the year of the startup. We will see increased interest in startups and the ecosystem to support them. Local governments will try to tap into this potential tax revenue by enticing statups to locate in their cities. Co-Locations (COLOs) will spring up, offering everything from high-speed Internet to showers and charging stations for electric cars. Businesses will start investing in startups as a way to off-set their high internal IT costs and as a way to see potential revenue streams. Tech companies will provide resources to court startups to use their technology. Expect to see “Price Wars” between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to try and dominate the statup space.
Ginni will remain in charge and consolidate her position of power at IBM.
Meanwhile IBM will convert everyone below band 10 to contractors.
Roadkill 2020 will come into effect.
We thought about doing that last summer. The law department thought it would be illegal so the plan was shelved. Don’t worry though — we have a lot more bad ideas on how to cut costs.
Anonymous Coward, is that you?
2015-2025: Bob still says nothing about NerdTV Season 2 after making tantalizing promises in 2009 and 2011. 🙁
Apple will introduce a new advertising service through iTunes. The user defines a list of “partners” , which is a list of iTunes accounts. For example, the Cringely site has a link on it that a user could press which would add the Cringely iTunes account to the user’s partner list. Then when the user clicks on a participating mercant advert on an app or site, the mercant donates a small amount to each of the user’s partner’s iTunes account, with Apple as the intermediary. Apple gets paid by the merchant if the user makes a purchase. A user partner could be anything with an iTunes account such as a person, charity, political party etc. Merchants would compare the click rate for a Google ad and an Apple ad and spend accordingly.
No one mentions Dell (which I find a bit surprising). Does their “go private” pay off??? …and how does that happen: stealing IBM customers (better cloud-based burritos, Ginny???)…or steal HP’s and/or Oracle’s???
Dell’s “go private” has already paid off: all they’ll keep doing is making more money
Low energy nuclear reactions, née cold fusion, will finally see the breakthrough that makes it viable. The breakthrough will be in the area of RF or magnetic energy output, not heat output. The U.S. will be caught off guard when the findings happen in another country.
This is the future of ecommerce
Amazon Rockets – 5 Minute Shipping
http://tinyurl.com/mgmbw7u
No one can top that…for wacky. 🙂
Israel is alredy using it in Ghaza, it’s called “rooftop knock-knock” and it’s quicker than 5 minutes… they just need to license it.
doesn’t mean I can’t try. Russia announces diplomatic message missle service, to start up any time now when the Ruble is 10,000,000 to the dollar. Nut Korea immediately releases its “me, too” announcement and drops a fizzle off its shores.
Apple Haters will still hate Apple for no reason other then it is something to hate.
Tiny house fanatics will realize a motor-home or travel trailer is a much better option with more versatile amenities than an overweight shack on a barely mobile platform. The industry builds 300,000 units a year these days…
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I don’t understand. Isn’t a motor-home or travel trailer an overweight shack on a barely mobile platform. That sounds like a perfect definition to me. I am clearly missing your point.
Ten thousand baby boomers a day retire (ie:10,000 per day) and the trend will continue for the next twenty years!
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None of the genie-ass MBA’s managing tech companies notice and NO new devices or apps will be offered for this historically relevant group.
For 2015 I foresee:
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(1) Text messaging bubble pops with Facebook as winner.
(2) 3D printers appear in kitchen to bake and make food.
(3) Intel gets a smartphone win in the United States.
(4) Portable smartphone printers popup.
(5) Time lapse image recognition is the next big thing.
(6) Personal cloud and commercial cloud synchronization happens.
(7) Cloud players own the data center, non-players don’t and one cloud evaporates.
(8) Amazon Echo defines a new must-have product.
(9) Smartphone with interchangeable camera lenses from major player.
(10) A social network for sensors is born.
(11) A major cloud outage disrupts tens of millions of Americans.
(12) Unfriend-ing leads to smaller personal social networks.
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In fact I see 2015 as the Year of the Unfriend. More about my predictions are at: https://www.pdxmobile.com/?p=31408
Just my usual boring prediction: The new big iPad will be a convertible so it will have an awesome A9 quad-core 64-bit desktop-class processor sipping almost no power and the keyboard and new desktop applications will make use of inter-application communication in the latest iOS to allow a long-lasting totally Apple computing experience but it will be cheaper than you might expect because its not fashionable jewellery, its designed to kill Intel, Microsoft and Dell instead.
Steve Balmer will become Yahoo’s next CEO.
Ballmer’s too busy micromanaging the Clippers playbook.
LOL !!! Good one. Thanks swschrad. One has to admit the NBA is getting some colorful owners — with folks like Balmer and Cuban.
A new Steve Jobs — DNA a perfect match, except for the clunky pancreas — will be created via 3D printing. A brain dump held in a super-secret repository will be used to boot up this critter.
Your clone — let’s call him Bob Flinchly — will go to work for this new Jobs.
But first there will be a life size Steve bobble head that speaks a few of his witticisms from a robotic sounding speaker. Sitting it in the apple lobby will keep employees and investors from getting too depressed that the company is stagnating without their dead innovator in chief.
My prediction:
1. Friday Cringely predictions will arrive on a Tuesday or on a Wednesday
2. Cloud computing will spread to specialized corporate areas e.g. logistics
3. Google glass will disappear / put on hold indefinately
4. Apple will delay the release of the watch, which will still be a success
5. Big data bubble will keep on growing
6. Ms will stop the Lumia phones
There is a Friday in every week. Bob won’t have a problem meeting this deadline.
Google Glass will disappear or put on hold indefintately…
can I mark this as a Hit or should we wait a while?
https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/15/7552349/google-glass-tony-fadell-explorer-shut-down
There’s no telling from that news about it’s transfer to Nest.
sales of Wintel devices will pick up unbelievably once the trade name “Confuser” is registered and stocked by… Unifying Perfect Leader Electronics of Nut Korea. the Internet will flow backwards towards Nut Korea.
As cyber-attacks continue to escalate and governments exert more and more control/censorship on the net,people start to pull the plug on the internet – at least to the extent of configuring their connections as “usually off”. It may not get noticed as a trend until 2016, but businesses will start imposing more onerous security requirements on their online users in order to avoid liability for data breaches. Some consumers will see this as a cue to tighten up their own security, and others will curtail their internet purchasing due to the greater complexity.
Re: “others will curtail their internet purchasing due to the greater complexity.” It’s still not as complex as driving/calling all over town, looking for something that probably isn’t stocked anyway, and if it is, over-paying to cover the cost of the store’s overhead.
Bob, Publish on which Friday? 🙂
I predict that businesses will once again leave themselves vulnerable to attack due to the reliance on a single OS (Windows). Much like the Irish Potato Famine. A network with multiple operating systems will be less likely to a wide scale attack and IT’s whining about support should no longer be tolerated.
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I predict that IBM will miss the opportunity created by the current hacking crisis as a way to re-establish the AS/400 system as a reliable and secure server for businesses. Hackers do not have easy access to these systems making it more difficult to find vulnerabilities.
Someone at IBM will realize that the iSeries is a great platform for selling line of business software on, and will acquire several independent software shops so the firm can re-brand their products and sell them at a profit. He will promptly be attacked by the rest of IBM for having an original idea without prior approval.
I’ve heard a rumor that CenturyLink is experimenting with IPTV.
I think Bob’s recent column on “TV 3.0 Is Already Here” is spot on. The recent announcement of DishTV’s new Sling TV is but another example. I predict in 2015 we’ll see a lot of new Internet TV services. Though I think the most successful service will be a partnership. I can see ESPN taking the lead and partnering with a few of the other good content providers to offer a service. For the last several years there have been a number of battles between the distributors (cable TV and satellite) and the content providers (usually Viacom). One is trying to keep competitive on their market and the other wants to raise the bar in prices. This problem will plague some of the new Internet services too. Consumers will pay only so much. If the content providers demand too much they will price themselves out of the service. The services don’t have enough content, they won’t survive. The answer will be for a content provider to go direct and organize a consortium. I predict ESPN will figure it out first and lead the charge.
unfortunately, the choice for the name of the service was Prism, not to be confused with Big Brother. but it’s expanding to more cities every quarter, including wherever GPON gigabit is sold by CenturyLink, which is expanding. parallels may be drawn to FiOS and Uverse if you wish.
In 2015 Bob will dress up as a cheerleader and sing the Toni Basil song “Mickey.” The music video performance of Bob will be so funny it will go viral and become an Internet sensation.
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Can I predict that the predictions column will be late?
Sure, if we count historical facts as predictions.
Well, I’ve been reading the column for years, where do you think I learned the trick?
Can I predict that “Friday” was an April Fools’ Joke?
In no particular order:
– AIX EoL’d
– HP-UX retired
– Itanium EoL’d (perhaps on an accelerated schedule)
– Solaris truly open-sourced / abandoned by Oracle in favor of OEL
– HP spins-off more business units
– IBM loses 25-35% of its value – and spins-off / sells more business units to make Wall Street happy
– POWER continues to slow; IBM doesn’t understand it needs to stop putting so much money into it until all the engineers have been fired
– Z/OS systems grow dramatically – the only place IBM makes *more* money
– people finally realize “cloud” isn’t a “thing” – it’s just renting crap when you need it (perhaps from yourself (private cloud)) and giving it back when you don’t
– cloud hosting providers cut prices so things like AWS instances are no longer more expensive than dedicated hardware (see eg http://benmilleare.com/how-shaving-0-001s-from-a-function-saved-us-400-dollars)
– enough of the Old Guard hits retirement age that New School tech can finally make big inroads into stodgy businesses and government (automation, cloud, *aaS, etc)
– buzzword-compliance becomes necessary even for mom-and-pop shops who don’t have computers
– Android 6 brings native, “real” 3D to cell phones
– … and iOS 9 makes it look “good”
– there’s a new MacBook Flex that offers touchscreen, a fold-flat-reverse form factor, and 12 hours of battery life; the iPad 5 is the first 5K resolution tablet, with a full day of battery life
– Max OS 10.11, aka Denali, allows users to run iOS apps via a “fat binary” model (harking back to the shift to PowerPC from 68k and then again x86 from PowerPC)
– Apple announces the first non-x86 Macs (starting with the Flex)
– Apple buys a car company in cash – Porsche or Hyundai (Hyundai would be the smart move – get more electronics manufacturing capability in-house; spins-off heavy industry wing)
– Tesla introduces a model that non-millionaires can afford – bringing snazzy competition to the Volt price point
– SpaceX sends a mission to Venus, and another to Mars
– Square opens an online bank
– Uber and Lyft grow, win cases against taxi companies – and local competition pops-up all over the country
– several major metro areas across the US all enter the “gigacity” club
– … but it’s led with smaller metro areas (like Chattanooga has already done)
I predict in 2015 Hollywood will discover the Cringely family and make a very successful movie about them. It will be a combination of National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), RV (2006), Astronaut Farmer (2006), and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006). It will feature the Cringely family on one of their famous RV trips.
Either OPEC (mainly the Saudis) will raise prices again after choking out the profits from smaller drillers in the States. Or give up after the US government subsidizes them more in a counter move and there becomes a temporary pricing stalemate. I’d go with the former as I am not sure the US Gov. would work that fast.
the Saudis are probably on a mission for Mideast control, more than even oil market control. all these worrisome murderous cliques popping up and profiting from the scattered oil deposits away from the motherlode. those cliques are a threat to Saudi stability. the US can stay out of the squabble thanks to frack-oil states on the Bakken, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Gulf waters. China is the odd power out. they might cuddle up to Russia again.
-Internet TV will explode
-Magic Leap will show first demo product and it will be the most talk product for the rest of the year.
-Cryptocurencys will get more and more traction as the monetarys sytems are colapsing more and more all over the word. But won’t be Bitcoin it will be Bitshares and Ethereum
-Google will launch for public use the first fleet of self driving cars.
A) The global debt bubble will burst and the stock market will tank like it’s 1929.
B) Randy Mills will finally come through and produce an energy-generating device that proves his hydrino theory is correct and quantum mechanics is bunk.
Apple releases the iPad Pro… with a kickstand.
Now that some ‘casting’ technologies are willing to let visitors cast to your in-home devices while they’re sitting in your living room, we’ll start seeing guest lists influenced by what’s on each guest’s phone. Why invite a Jim, a feature-phone friend, to your party when Bob has an iPhone with a great music collection and a few kick-ass movies?
Hey, stop looking a my digital assets – my eyes are up here!
Apple will design a watch specifically for the 12-16 year old demographic. Smaller form factor, with boy/girl variations. Kids don’t care about health monitoring, so there will be an entirely different killer feature for this group. Coolness!
Microsoft Bob will be resurrected and will become the UI for Microsoft’s mobile operating system. Since Bob already looks like a game it will be a natural in the mobile world. As you scroll between home screens you will see different rooms with different themes where you can access different families of applications. The store will look like a store.
I miss Bob.
Annual Prediction Yet to Come True: Microsoft dumps the Windows kernel and uses the LINUX kernel with a Windows GUI on top of it and calls it . . . Windows.
Since we interact with the computer through the GUI, maybe someone secretly did that decades ago.
If I can’t be the first to post, I may as well be the last.
In late 2015, a major retailer will suffer a credit card breach. No, that is not a prediction, that’s a given. What will be unique about this breach is that it will take place after the October 2015 liability shift. This retailer will not have implemented EMV/chip-and-pin card reader devices, and Visa and its card-issuing banks will hold the retailer liable for all losses related to the breach. The retailer will declare bankruptcy.
Before that the retailor will post a sign “Use credit cards at your own risk. Our terminals have not yet been updated. We are not security gurus and cannot be held responsible for data breaches.”
@Ronc – I claim the first prediction for 2016: Signs to that effect won’t be mandated until May 2016, when a reactionary Congress, looking to show its concern for the consumers, er, voters, will pass legislation requiring that retailers who have not upgraded their payment systems must document it. By then, however, retailers, having learned their lesson, will have realized that its more cost effective to pay $500 per register to upgrade than to risk having the liability death sentence imposed. And so it goes.