Last week a reader told me that six predictions for 2017 weren’t enough and that I owed him four more, so here they are.
Prediction #7 — Not the demise of Bitcoin, but finally an acceptance of what the crypto currency is (and isn’t). My son Cole, who is 12 (and now taller than me), was for awhile a Bitcoin miner. We bought a used Ant Miner last year on eBay, equipped it with a proper power supply and set it going 24/7 in the Man Cave, where most boyish things happen around here. The rig was incredibly loud and — after the first electric bill arrived — totally uneconomic. We were paying twice as much for electrons as Cole was receiving in Bitcoins for his labor. Anyone with a robust solar installation want to buy an Ant Miner?
Then a few weeks ago Bitcoin prices started to rise again and I saw Bitcoin stories with headlines like Too Big to Fail. Yet what goes up seems to inevitably come down because Bitcoin prices crashed yet again a few days ago. This led me to a realization that I think is going to become popular: Bitcoin is an excellent transfer currency but as a longer term store of value it sucks and that isn’t likely to change.
Bitcoin is a great idea, blockchain is an even better idea, but since neither is backed by the full faith and credit of, well, anyone, a Bitcoin will always be a sorry substitute for a dollar or a yen. The price of Bitcoins will rise as folks in China find the need to use them to get money out of that country. But when their money finally is out of the China it is inevitably converted straight into dollars and the Bitcoin crashes as a result. So there may be some cyclical arbitrage opportunity in Bitcoins, timing the market to take advantage of the suckers, but as a true currency, Bitcoin will probably never cut it.
This says nothing about technical merit, mind you. What matters here is psychology and behavior. It’s the “full faith and credit” thing. Without it Bitcoin can’t be trusted to be any more than a short-term monetary value mule.
And we’ve seen this effect before. PayPal would love if we’d leave our nominally dollar-denominated savings deposited in PayPal and storied in the form of, I guess PayPals or whatever you’d call them. But most people don’t carry a PayPal balance of any note, either. PayPal’s recent policy about this has changed a bit and I think that, too, is a psychology experiment. It used to take three business days to get PayPal money into your bank account but that time just switched to one business day. Much better, but I doubt that anything technically changed in their system. Rather PayPal probably figured out that the best way to get people to keep at least a small balance in PayPal wasn’t to make it difficult to take money out but to make it easier. If you can get it in a day, well then why even bother to move the money? You’ll just end up needing it to buy something with, anyway.
Prediction #8 — Apple Video. According to the Wall $treet Journal Apple is adding some original video content to its Apple Music streaming service. I think this presages a new — yet to be announced — Apple video service.
Apple appears to be doing a modified version of Amazon’s Prime strategy. Subscribe to Prime and, in addition to two-day shipping, you get thousands of hours of video to stream. Subscribe to Apple Music and you’ll (eventually) get thousands of hours of video. Or not…
Netflix and Amazon Prime each have about five times as many subscribers as Apple Music, so that’s the target. If Apple reaches 100 million subscribers (from the current 20 million) that will mean $1 billion in revenue per month with some amount of that available to support video. But not very much, actually, if we remember Apple likes high margin businesses and they are already paying the musicians from that same $10. So this addition of original video programming to Apple Music is unlikely to change it into a Netflix competitor despite what the Wall $treet Journal has to say. More likely it’s a marketing tool. Throw a little video into Apple Music and use that to boost subscribers and prepare the world for the real service which I predict will be called Apple Video.
Apple Video will cost another $10 ($10 just for video on top of $10 for music if it is a combined product, which I frankly doubt) if they go head-to-head with Netflix or $20+ more if they decide to add live network content and compete with the new OTT cable providers. My guess is that Apple will offer both types of services. Netflix now has a $6 billion budget for video of all kinds (original and licensed) so Apple will have to spend the same to compete. Apple can afford to spend that kind of money with confidence that the audience will eventually grow revenue.
So in terms of business impact on the video production (originals) and movie industries we can see an additional $6 billion in revenue from Apple having two impacts over the next couple of years. It will grow the business but also push prices higher because this is $6 billion in additional demand. Notice I don’t include television revenue in this number because that’s OTT revenue from essentially carrying existing networks like broadcast, HBO, etc. It’s a different pool of money that will eventually be about the same size — another $6 billion if Apple is successful. And why shouldn’t they be successful? They have the money, have the style, have 20 million Music subscribers and 200 million credit card numbers. There will be multiple OTT success stories and Apple is well positioned to be one of those.
Half of my audience wonders what this means for Apple shares? Well 100 million subscribers at $20+ per month is at least $24 billion per year and definitely a business worth Apple’s time. Say they are able to maintain their current margins of about 38 percent that means an extra $9 billion in profit per year. At Apple’s historic P/E ratio of about 13 that should add $118 billion in market cap, which is interesting because that’s more than Netflix is worth today. THAT’s why it makes more sense for Apple to build rather than just buy Netflix, though there’s an extra risk in doing so. An extra $118 billion in market cap would take the stock, currently at $122, to $144. That’s not Earth-shaking but it IS progress and solid growth almost without regard to what happens with the rest of the market, which could be key over the next couple years of market uncertainty.
Prediction #9 — The rise of inter-cloud services. We’re in our second consecutive Year of the Cloud with this one bigger than the last and every cloud provider business plan is pretty much the same: use my cloud, it can do everything you need to do. Every cloud is a silo so if you choose Amazon’s cloud that means you pretty much aren’t choosing Google’s or Microsoft’s.
But why would you want to choose Google or Microsoft if Amazon was already doing so well? It’s that eggs and baskets thing, again. While there are efficiencies to be gained by choosing a cloud provider and sticking to that choice, what happens when there is a big service outage? You and your customers are screwed.
I’m beginning to think all these cloud monopolies aren’t natural and are likely to fail over time. This is not to say that the companies or the clouds, themselves, will cease to exist. What I mean is that a new class of startups is coming that will undermine cloud solitude in order to benefit cloud service and security overall.
Maybe it’s a backup service from one cloud to another in a few seconds. Maybe it’s just capacity planning and failover, but I think startups will be showing us how to link databases and the code between genetically dissimilar clouds just to keep everything working in times of stress. It’s inevitable and 2017 is the year this will happen.
Prediction #10 — Nobody wins the Google Lunar X-Prize. Just yesterday the X-Prize Foundation announced that there are five teams still left in the running for the Google Lunar X-Prize (GLXP), which is scheduled to be finished one way or another by the end of this calendar year. There were by my calculations, only two GLXP teams that had an even remote chance of winning — SpaceIL from Israel and the Part-time Scientists from Germany. Well the Part-time Scientists didn’t make this week’s short list and that’s the only real news. Maybe their backer, Audi, didn’t want to pay the big bucks for a Falcon 9 launch, I simply don’t know. But the departure of the Germans was a surprise to me.
To win, a team has to have both a viable launch and a viable lander. At the moment it doesn’t appear to me that any team has both. Some, like Moon Express, actually have neither. Their ride to space isn’t tested and if they have a lander nobody I know has actually seen it. The Indian and Japanese teams seem to have a viable launch but no finished rovers to carry on that launch. And poor SpaceIL, which had both a lander and a launcher in SpaceX, seems to have recently lost their launch through no fault of theirs. It is possible the Israelis will find another launch in time but far from guaranteed.
What’s happening with SpaceIL is their Falcon 9 launch slot was reclaimed by Spaceflight, the company that aggregates and resells excess launch capacity, so this doesn’t directly have anything to do with SpaceX, itself. One explanation is that Spaceflight found more lucrative passengers for that launch but I don’t know if that’s the real reason. SpaceIL required a large fraction of the mission’s launch capacity, not because they are so large, but rather because they required the F9 upper stage to inject them into a high elliptical orbit (thus limiting mass available for payloads into Low Earth Orbit). Spaceflight has told at least one person that they were just not confident that the SpaceIl lander design could tolerate the launch. It sounds weird but that’s one story. It makes SpaceIL unhappy, but I don’t think that they have too many options, though Spaceflight says they are still looking for SpaceIL another 2017 launch.
So I’m predicting nobody makes it to the Moon this year. And Google, which is sick and embarrassed by this whole mess, has made it clear that at the end of 2017 the GLXP will disappear forever, so get over it.
Of course this reads nothing like this week’s many GLXP news stories on the subject. Alternative facts? Nope, Im just trying to be a realistic prognosticator.
The price of a bitcoin is completely unmoored to any other currency. It can shoot up or down quickly. If a critical mass of people decide it’s not good to hold onto, and all try to sell it off at the same time, the price will collapse pretty quickly. As long as it has some value, though, it’s useful. That is, until a better service comes along.
So, I think a plunge in value will tell us prediction #1 is correct. I’m sure it will happen some day, but there’s no telling when.
the BiteCon is rife for speculators. it has no value, no backing, and swings like a pendulum. I can’t see why anybody thinks it’s good for anything other than buying things without (easy) traceability. we already know if the feds want to chase a transaction hard enough, they can track BiteCon back far enough for a courtroom.
Luckily, the US dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.
Apparently a 12 year old thinks it’s interesting…
The only purpose of Bitcoin is to act as a black market currency. There is no viability in it since bitcoins don’t actually exist. They are not backed by anything, not gold, not a government, nothing.
That’s the whole point. They’re not subject to government meddling or commodity price swings.
There is an argument to say that part of the perceived value of gold comes from the fact that it is rare and expensive to mine, so a lot of effort/energy has to go in to producing a gold coin. My understanding is that the bitcoin mining process by which new bitcoins are “minted” was deliberately designed to be very expensive in terms of CPU power in order to assign some sort of base value to bitcoins, i.e. they wouldn’t be considered to be worth less than the cost of the electricity that went into mining them. There were of course advances in mining technology such as dedicated bitcoin mining hardware, which changed the balance a bit here.
There will come a time when Americans will urgently want to get their wealth out of dollars, and also out of the US. And like the Chinese and countless countries before, the government will ramp up the existing exchange controls. When a regime does that, it is a strong signal and incentive to circumvent those controls.
Yeah, the next time a Democrat gets elected to the White House along with a majority of the House and Senate…
Dollar gained in value considerably the last time that happened, compared to other currencies. Dollar dropped but other currencies dropped more against gold.
Actually,on your last posting, you were asked on 9-Jan for some more predictions and you then replied on 10-Jan that you would do so in a day or two. In this post you mention that this happened “last week”, I’m assuming that you used the same math where a 21-day Kickstarter project has now taken over 21 months.
.
In other comments on the same posting, you promised an update on the Mineserver project in a couple of days. When will that long promised update happen? Or is this going to be one of your failed predictions for this year?
We are owed a prediction of the status and delivery of the Mineservers. Your communications have been terrible.
I feel embarrassment for the man, because it appears he has none of his own. Nothing more to say.
You have to realize that this is a dad and a couple of teenage sons trying to put a hardware/software product on the market that you are expecting to be a full business with support and returns. Gofundme’s are experiments. I’m predicting that a large number of Gofundme projects probably fail. Bob is not going to work 80-100 hours a week on it, nor is he going to ask kids who have schoolwork every night to, either. Hardware/software combos are always risky and fraught with difficult challenges that sometimes can’t be solved without lots of overtime and sometimes even outside engineers to make sure that they are not walking into becoming the next IOT zombie on some hacker’s code infusion. I am guessing if it gets released at all, it will like be next summer when he and the boys have 3 full months without school to “get it done”. A few lawyers have probably even told him to “not take the risk”.
@TXIBMer: None of that excuses the many, many broken promises (like the two on the 10th made in comments on his last post to this very blog promising something “in a few days”) to simply communicate with the backers. That’s what they’re complaining about. Those capable of embarrassment tend avoid publicly trashing their own reputation repeatedly by proving their word is worthless, but not this guy. You might want to read up on the history of the issue before further embarrassing yourself.
@TXIBMer: Just to correct your “facts”, this project is on Kickstarter not Gofundme, it is by a father and three sons, and their original project page promised “unlike most Kickstarter projects, all of the engineering is already done and we just need funding for custom cases”. Try to get your facts straight before you cast doubt on others.
They also have promised several times “we will never let you down.” The father has also made comments on this blog about how unreasonable people on the Internet are. referring to the backers for the Mineserver project.
.
So the project started with a lie and the lies have continued coming.
.
This project appears to be an example of “fake it until you make it.” It would be one thing if they would just admit that the project will never ship and shut it down. But what they have done for over a year now is post that everything is now done and shipments will start in a week. They then go dark for a couple of months and then pretend that nothing is wrong.
@TXIBMer Just to add to this (though the last two said it well), if you read the comments, 90% of the people don’t care that the product is incomplete; The issue is that Cringely (you can say it’s the boys product but they have never spoken to the backers once, only the father) does not communicate to the backers. We have said many times that we don’t need novels, we just want a sentence or two stating “something is wrong. hope to hear from us soon” or “moving along. we’ll give more details shortly.” but instead we constantly get MONTHS of silence without ANY confirmation he has ever read the comments or is hearing us, filled with countless lies and a complete lack of ownership for MANY MANY missed deadlines, which he drops as fool proof and planned to go off without a hitch.
.
At this point I think this is the ultimate Punk’ed campaign and am constantly looking for hidden cameras as I think he’s actually just running a social experiment and the joke is most certainly on us. If it didn’t have the name Cringely attached I would have thought this was a scam over a year ago, but even now I’m starting to question it, Cringely or not…
.
So yes, like others have said, get your facts straight before you berate us as we’re all over a year into this and quite frustrated with this man and the marathon he has put us through, all of which are for reasons you seem to be oblivious to.
@Derek: It’s the Cringely name attachment that’s got my goat. I’ve never played Minecraft, didn’t back the mineserver project, don’t have a dog in this hunt, but I’ve been reading Cringely for decades and thought I could trust most of what I’ve been reading. Then came the mineserver project, which I thought was a real cool project for the kids and followed with interest. The inevitable glitches and delays were no surprise, but after a few months of that the guy with a long career of demonstrated proficiency in technical communications decided he couldn’t even spare a reasonably adequate supply of that to the backers he collected $35k from. The Devil’s in the Details post from last March was an otherwise good example of what backers should expect by way of status update (quality, not necessarily volume, of info), but even that started out with another broken promise: “On the eve of their product finally shipping”. And now the last update on the Kickstarter page is over 11 weeks stale while backers implore more info on a nearly daily basis in comments. So instead of just doing something simple we all know he’s good at, we see more worthless promises here to communicate “more on that in a few days” followed by the inevitable sound of crickets for 3 weeks and counting now.
.
So I’m perplexed; why has this competent tech communicator I’ve never had reason to mistrust before been behaving like a lying scammer, ducking and dodging investors’ questions about the status of the long-overdue project for weeks and months at a time with undelivered promises to address them? It has completely broken my faith in Cringely’s word, for whatever that’s worth (obviously not much to him).
I don’t think Cringley or his sons are system/software engineers (yet). He probably bit off more than he could chew with the project. You know how system/software projects with the best intentions that are planned to take x amount of time end up taking x*100 amount of time, and even then they fail because of requirements that weren’t known (2nd order of ignorance: I don’t know that I don’t know something). You seem to be very worried about it, are you in some hurry with respect to the project? Maybe you should relax and give the guy a break.
@ No One: Your comment is very heavy on speculation. Not that I blame you, that’s the point – speculation is all we have since Cringely won’t even talk about it.
.
I speculate that the project has become a nightmare. In the Devil’s in the Details post he mentioned that they were losing about $15 per unit “so far” for Kickstarter units but hoped to make enough profit selling post-Kickstarter units to put the kids through college. Now, nearly a year later and still having not shipped any product, those losses can only have gotten worse, and the vision of future profit more hazy. What they had once hoped would pay for college may be looking more likely to hang an albatross of hundreds of small-claims court judgments on their necks instead. If this is the case they surely have a bit of my sympathy, but that is tempered by the lack of transparency expected of Kickstarter projects.
.
Again, speculation is all we have, but somehow I doubt that the marketing strategy “(called “F-ing brilliant” by a VC friend)” was to abandon the project and its backers and hope the whole thing will just go away. It’s a pretty shabby way to treat backers who have been patient and understanding about the technical issues. Many have offered to accept units as-is and help work out the rough spots, to no response. It’s the no response thing that everyone is taking issue with.
No One: No, Cringely is not technically competent, nor are, presumably, his kids. Yes, projects take longer than expected, especially so on Kickstarter.
However, as has been said repeatedly, the delays are not the real issue of concern; it is the utter lack of communication, honesty, and transparency. Cringely has *not* communicated and has repeatedly failed to deliver on promises of communication. This is all the more egregious given that he styles himself as a journalist or writer.
As for being in some hurry… well, yes. The original claim by Cringely was that the mineservers were complete and ready ship, save for the manufacture of the custom cases. So there was a practical reason, for me and many others, in backing this project — it was to be a gift for my kids who were, at the time, into playing minecraft. Sadly, nearly a year and a half later, there are still no mineservers and only one of my kids is still interested in minecraft. So, yes, there is a time factor.
I suspect that most of his backers would be willing to give him a break, if only he had been open and honest with us. He hasn’t, so we aren’t.
@TXIBMer: Anyone who has backed more than a couple of kickstarter projects (especially tech projects) knows that projects are almost always late. That’s not the problem here.
Many people backed the MineServer project for a noticeable amount of money (for me, it is not so much that my wife noticed it on the credit card bill but more than I would care to admit to her that I spent) precisely because of the Cringely name. At the very least, we (I, anyway) expected entertaining and informative updates and narrative about the project and their experiences. That’s really why we gave Cringely $100 for something we knew wouldn’t arrive for a while.
Did we expect “a full business with support and returns?” No. No one expected 80-100 hours a week; we just expected a ten-minute update once a week. Maybe, if he cared about the project and his reputation as a writer, an hour’s worth of prose every couple of weeks.
As for his kids, well, I try not to publicly judge someone else’s parenting, but I will say that if it had been my three kids, there would have been no way they would have been off riding roller coasters this summer if they hadn’t met their obligation to their backers, at the very least in the form of communication.
So, again, we’re not worried about the delay; we’re upset by the apparent disregard for his backers.
In the comments on his last post here (the first predictions article), Cringely said *twice* that he would update backers “in a few days.” Yeah, well, he didn’t. But no one was surprised by that; it seems he sees us more as annoyances than supporters.
Me, if I owe someone money or have promised to do something for them or anything like that, I fret about it until I’ve paid them back or done what I said I’d do. I may not lose sleep over it but I certainly keep it in mind as I go through my day. But that’s because I try to be a principled, honest person. I’m not sure that Cringely shares that flaw.
Readers are interested in emerging tech. What is on the drawing board in Si valley startups or research think tanks? Apparently slow Bob has no clue. So we get these boring, recycled *predictions*. Apple will ape what netfix/amazon have done for years. IBM will do the sleazy things they’ve always done… Yawn.
–
Are there any bloggers worth reading any more? This guy is covered in mold and cobwebs.
Mark. What entitled vitriolic drivel. You dont have to read it. You putting your own hand up to write the enlightened blog masterpiece of the year?
I found it a pretty good read, thanks mr cringely
In 10 years, the price of low-end consumer drones that can land on the moon and beam back footage (through commercial relays) will drop under $1000 as cheap knock-offs flood the market.
Prediction11: The 50-state US will cease to exist as it will split up into two or more countries.
Do you mean I’m going to have to learn Spanish? Or will this only be a division between the mostly left-wing coasts and the mostly right-wing flyover country?
California may decide to split off — but all that’s going to happen as a result is that the liberals will no longer be able to win the popular vote, making it easier for conservatives to keep control. (That’s fine with me.) And the governor of CA will find it’s not so easy running a country as it is running a State. So basically there will be a lot of pressure for CA to not leave by the east coast liberals (which is probably a bit ironic).
South Carolina tried to leave the United States back in 1860, later followed by ten other states.
The Feral Government *really* didn’t like that.
I doubt the People’s Democratic Republic of California would fare any better than South Carolina did.
Republicans will be happy to see California go. Peter Thiel has already said as much. Without California, Republican control over the rest of the country would be absolute.
Of course, this would probably then lead to other blue states breaking off.
In essence, the US is two tribes in ever-increasing conflict while trying to impose a way of life that is anathema to the other side. It’s time the country had a divorce.
California has a lot of Republican voters, wishing to remain in the US. We have voted for Republican governors, Arnold Schwarzenegger, recently. The Republicans are at least saving us from communism.
Some are saying there will be California, Oregon, Washington joining Canada. My question is why do they want to join Canada and not Mexico?
How about they split California into two, so that the coastal liberals can live with the illegal immigrants they want to legalize?
Speaking on behalf of all Coastal California Conservatives (CCC) we live here for the weather, not the politics.
“…since neither is backed by the full faith and credit of, well, anyone, …”
The future always presents ass-first. What is really going on here is that there are no longer any entities — individuals, nation-states, or anything in between — whose “full faith and credit” still has any value.
Everyone seems to think that it is suddenly and alarmingly becoming more difficult to decide whom to trust. What is really happening is that we are being confronted with the immediate and unconditional need to create environments where TRUST DOES NOT MATTER.
It will then be seen that trust was always an infantile concept.
This is for blockchain and bitcoin. Everyone realizes that BitCoin is “headless” and while that is great in theory, it is terrible in having “the full faith and credit of “. The next versions in the lab are being touted as having a “head” with the government being able to audit and “oversee” transactions. Not so great for drug dealers or arms merchants, but really great for people who want to do legitimate business. I think it will “eventually” get touted as “the legitimate way” to do business and even embed supply chain documents and project managment milestones in the blockchain. And healthcare services rendered. It will become the “new business secure Internet”. But the reality is that it is still squarely in “the lab” and companies using it today are early experimenters. Pioneers always find “the arrows” as they trek into the unknown. I think most companies will wait until it’s quite a bit more mature, but I do think it will be a game changer, but more like in 3-5 years. Something to follow now and jump in, in about 2 years. Not “quite” ready for prime time.
As long as “audit and oversee transactions” does not include the types of controls that allow the government to inflate or deflate the value of the currency, the main problem with fiat currencies.
You didn’t say anything about net neutrality and how that looks to have changed in the last two weeks. It could obviously impact streaming, netflix and if Apple wants to get into that. It could even impact the cloud, especially since much of that is tied to streaming.
With Verizon maybe buying Charter there’s going to be a series of mergers that could create three or four companies big enough to compete with tech. Net neutrality would give them more power. Apple would not get so much subsidies. Google will need to go back to building their own network.
Re: “Net neutrality would give them more power.” Net Neutrality means that ISPs can’t discriminate in price or service level, based on the source of the bits. I don’t understand what “compete with tech” means, or who supposedly gets more power.
Re: The Cloud
I really don’t understand why most people would want to have their software on the Cloud, particularly their Microsoft Software. By having your software on the Cloud, you are laying yourself open to the whims and arrogance of the software provider. For instance, about 2 years ago, Google changed the compose feature of gmail into a form that was virtually unusable. (Among other things, you couldn’t modify the subject line when replying and you were only given a small window to type your email) It was greeted with 99% disapproval on forums. See https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/gmail/compose$20ronna%7Csort:date%7Cspell:true/gmail/fkjFJpV2hBE
Google arrogantly ignored the complaints of its users. (Caused me to switch to Bing search engine) With Cloud based services, you are always at risk of practically losing your past work, if the provider changes its policies or software or if the provider greatly raises its prices. I will always prefer owning my own software on my own computer. The fact that I am a lawyer and am responsible to my clients for work I have provided, makes it even more important to maintain control over my past work.
So either you never update your computer and so your clients information is not safe. Or you do update and so you do in fact rely on the whims of others.
By the way, companies that need more assurance, will put that in the contract with the cloud provider. Comparing with a free service like GMail isn’t relevant.
Reiner: I update my computer (windows 7) and find proprietary software I can buy (or can also use open source.) Not difficult. Might cost me more short-term, but long-term I believe I will come out ahead. Others can put their trust in Cloud software, but I will never be one of them.
You’ve got some looooong weeks in California Mark.
So, why do those silly little peasants from Kickstarter keep coming here and posting annoying comments about the Mineserver project? Aren’t they over that already? You have more important things to do!
–
We come and post here because it seems this is the only way to get you to remember that you have an outstanding kickstarter project hanging over your head.
–
Imagine how wonderful it would be if, on every post you make here, there were more comments about the Mineserver than there were about whatever drivel you had written? Well, maybe not wonderful for you, but it would certainly be satisfying for those of us whose money you’ve taken.
–
As for your kids — what have they learned from all this? That if you’re famous and wealthy, you can get away with anything? That you don’t have to keep your promises or follow through on your commitments? As a fellow father of three, I feel sorry for your kids. On the upside, they have been an excellent example for my kids of how not to treat people. Thanks in part to you, my kids will follow through on their obligations.
ouch !
Isn’t it ironic that the guy who can explain IBM’s failure to deliver value to paying customers in great detail over a rapidly-posted series of articles doesn’t seem to be able do the same with regards to a small company with which he is intimately familiar (in every sense of the word).
It would be ironic if the kids of an H1-B visa holder launched a similar project and delivered it on time 🙂
Maybe Mark is tied up working on his fake phd and professorship at Stanford: https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Stanford-Says-Cringely-Never-Completed-Doctorate-2979415.php
.
or his moon project: https://www.cringely.com/tag/moon-exploration/
.
or the time that Wired called him a confidence man: https://www.wired.com/1998/12/cringely/
Beginning of the end of MSFT .
Microsoft wants every one and his brother to upgrade to Windows 10 .
And it is even free – really ?
Why do I get the feeling there is more to this ?
So what happens when every one has been corralled in ?
Saas – in other words ,you don’t own the software – if you want to play , pay up.
What will happen ?
Many fellows like me would clutch on to their copy of Win 7 or even XP.
And how about our beloved corporates ?
My bet is they too will leave in droves.
So who is going to buy this ? that too every year ?
The free offer to upgrade from 7 or 8.1 to the corresponding version of 10 lasted for one year and is now over, except for people with accessibility issues. For OEMs making new computers with small screens it’s free: https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/2/5574146/microsoft-making-windows-free-on-devices-with-screens-under-nine . As applied to Windows 10, saas seems to mean that future upgrades, now called “feature updates” to distinguish them from “security updates”, will also be free on the same machine. There may be good technical reasons for people to stick with an older OS, but that has nothing to do with price or the imposition of a subscription model, for which there are no plans or even credible rumors.
Heh, just noticed this bit:
–
“My son Cole, who is 12 (and now taller than me), was for awhile a Bitcoin miner. We bought a used Ant Miner last year on eBay . . . We were paying twice as much for electrons as Cole was receiving in Bitcoins for his labor.”
–
So here’s the real story. Cole & Co. got bored with the whole Mineserver thing (since the fun part of figuring it out was done with and all that was left was the boring crap — y’know, making it production-worthy and sending it out) so he/they moved on to bitcoin.
–
I wonder if the kickstarter funds went to paying for the Ant Miner and that electric bill?
@Roger Sinasohn: I saw that and wondered if any of the technical challenges might be related to stealth software running in the background to mine Bitcoins for the Cringely clan. Kinda gives the Mineserver name another dimension, eh? And I could sure see a “VC friend” calling a plan to spread out the electric bill for mining operations to thousands of little server boxes running 24/7 on someone else’s electricity pretending to act solely as Minecraft servers “F’ing brilliant”. Of course there would be real technical challenges to clandestine collaboration between scattered boxes and limiting cpu usage so as not to hinder Minecraft server responsiveness noticeably – the kind of technical challenges that might hold up a project for a year or more….
Of course, it’s all just speculation. Would be nice if someone privy to real facts cleared the air some, but who can we trust?
Türkiyenin bir numaralı eğitim kurumu olan bahçeşehir bale kursu ile geleceğinizi yönlendirebilirsiniz. Rüya avcısı sanat merkezi ile sektörde 28 yıllık deneyimimiz ile eğitimlerimize bakırköy resim kursu ile beraber şimdide bahçeşehir bale kursu adı altında eğitim vermekteyiz.
Avcılarda bulunan eğitim kurumumuz ile Bahçeşehir’de bulunan kurumumuzun İstanbulun özellikle Avrupa yakasındaki bir çok öğrenciye olanak sağlamaktadır.
http://ruyaavcisi.com/bahcesehir-bale-kursu/
Long time reader of this blog, and the old PBS one, first time poster. Enjoy your articles Cringley, especially the predictions.
The kickstarter comments led me to post here.
I’ve seen them pop up again and again over the last few months, and just assumed Cringley was being trolled.
Curiosity finally got the best of me, and I read the Kickstarter page. I have to say I am completely baffled by Cringley’s lack of response/posts either there or here. I’m pretty sure if he just posted ANYTHING once month he could have satisfied 99% of the people. Instead he has ignored them so badly and blatantly lied about update schedules they started posting here, his Wikipedia page, etc. Why would someone shoot themselves in the foot so badly? Maybe this is a case of no publicity is bad publicity? Truly baffled.
@Rob Smith
In my opinion, Mark isn’t posting anything on the Kickstarter page since he would have to admit to another failure after all of his promises of success. Lately, this blog is all about how great he is so he can’t say anything about the Mineserver project since that would put a negative element into this blog. But even in this blog, he can’t seem to keep himself from posting “alternative facts”. In the first line of this posting he mentions “last week” for events that happened over two weeks previously. He could have said “in my last post” or even “recently” but he had to post what would make him look responsive. I have also been reading these post for a long time but I have noticed a trend lately where Mark will quote a “world class” expert on a subject who’s name can’t be mentioned. After what I have seen lately, how many of these experts that he likes to mention even exist?
.
Anyone here familiar with the fraud of James Frey? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Little_Pieces
To be honest I’m in the same boat. I didn’t contribute but I’m astonished at how far this has been allowed to go. What’s strange is that Cringely always took a humorous approach to his failures — he was a guy who had built technology that “almost worked” and companies that badly failed. That was part of the whole persona.
.
Maybe there’s health problems that aren’t be disclosed? Aside from his eyes, I guess.
.
If you go back to the first post about this, ironically enough, the first mention of this project references his kids using Kickstarter solely as a sales channel, setting a goal they will have an easy time meeting strictly to reach ideal customers that regularly use the Kickstarter platform.
.
The whole story is probably interesting. Maybe we’ll hear about it someday.
Like the man said (damn near a month ago), “More on that in a few days”…
Maybe it’s a class in “life lessons” the man is putting his kids through. And the “semester” is not over yet.
Çocuklar klasik bale ve dans eğitimi ve modern dansın eğlenceli ve enerjik egzersizleriyle vücut becerilerini , esneklik kazanacaklar.
İçimizdeki dans aşkını yağmur, kar hiçbir şey dindiremez. Çünkü dans etmeyi seviyoruz ve bu işi yaparken çok mutluyuz. Bahçeşehir bale kursu eğitimi, sağlıklı, güçlü bir bünyeye sahip olabilir, bağışıklık sisteminizi güçlendirebilirsiniz. Öğrencilerin duruşu, yürüyüşünü kendini ifade edebilme tarzını geliştirebilirsiniz. Fiziksel estetik sağlar. Ücretsiz deneme eğitimi için arayabilirsiniz.
http://ruyaavcisi.com/bahcesehir-bale-kursu/
You primates and your reactive meso-limbic systems!
Open systems win; closed systems lose.
When anyone could make stuff for the DOS Wintel system, it won and apple as a closed shop lost. When windows became a PITA to program, its been in a downward spiral. And since Android and Apple were fairly easy to program they won and the desktop lost. There are other reasons that boil down to a tautological restatement of the first statements. It is NOT, however, a question of stuff (money, resources, hardware) but a question of ease of putting in new stuff.
It is necessary and sufficient for Apple video to act like a U-tube that allows tipping and opens up to creative people to put stuff onto it and get money from doing this.. If they do this, then I have killer video’s that will make it a success…..
.
And so does (literally) everyone else.
.
I predict they won’t do it in 2017.
(silly primates).
Off topic: would the web site manager consider implementing SSL for this site to protect readers from government and ISP data collection and reporting concerns.