Prediction #5 — Drones become Pizza-to-the-Neighborhood (PTTN)

I’ve already written one prediction about autonomous cars — that they’ll be far later to the market than most pundits and autonomous car inventors are suggesting. Today’s prediction is about a tangentially-related technology — aerial delivery drones. These drones are definitely coming just as fast as regulators will allow them, but I don’t think they’ll be implemented in the way people expect. What we’ll see, I predict, is something I call Pizza-to-the-Neighborhood or PTTN.

Aerial drones are a new type of distribution network operating in a new kind of ether. They don’t travel on roads and neither do they travel in what we conventionally think of as airspace. […]

By |April 4th, 2019|2019, mobile technology, Predictions, Uncategorized|259 Comments
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Prediction #4 — Self-driving cars won’t happen this year no matter what Elon says

We all know people who seem to not like anything. There are very successful people who sometimes seem to have reached that success entirely through saying “no.” I’m not that kind of person. I’m an optimist. I’m even a bit of a risk-taker. But I can’t say that we’re going to see anything beyond more beta tests of self-driving cars in 2019. So my Prediction #4 is that self-driving cars won’t hit the retail market in any fashion this year. We simply aren’t ready and probably won’t be for years to come.

The problem with self-driving cars isn’t the technology. Heck, we’ve had the technology pretty much whipped for the past decade. […]

By |March 19th, 2019|2019, Predictions|134 Comments
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2019 Predictions #2 and #3 — A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) shakeout and legal trouble for AWS

Prediction #2 — And then there were only 3.5 VPC Cloud players.  Cloud computing will continue to grow in 2019 with the key term being not Public Cloud, Private Cloud or Hybrid Cloud — which are all so 2018 — but Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Virtual Private Cloud is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) invention but all the AWS competitors seem to be embracing the idea.

What has developed is that the VPC solution based on Open Source using Linux will change the Internet-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloudscape to VPC-only during 2019.   

Gartner has certainly embraced it. Here’s a 2018 Magic Quadrant chart showing how Gartner sees the segment shaping-up. The first […]

By |March 7th, 2019|2019, cloud computing, Predictions|82 Comments
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2019 Prediction #1 — Apple under Tim Cook emulates GE under Jack Welch

People — well, investors and financial analysts — seem to worry a lot about Apple. They tend to see Apple as either wonderful or terrible, bound for further greatness or doomed. What Apple actually is is huge — a super tanker of a company. And, like a super tanker, it’s hard to quickly change Apple’s direction or to make it go appreciably faster or slower. Those who see Apple as doomed, especially, should remember they are worrying about the most profitable enterprise in the modern history of business. Those who see Apple as immortal should remember that’s impossible.

The worry about Apple in 2019 seems to be that the smart phone market […]

By |February 27th, 2019|2019, Companies, Predictions|89 Comments
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Bob’s Predictions for 2019 — The Year When Everything Changes… Forever

Now, finally, to my predictions for 2019. This is, I believe, my 22nd and possibly last year of looking ahead, so I want to do something different and potentially bigger. Our old format works fine but I’ve been pondering this and I really think we’re at a sea-change in technology. It’s not just that new tech is coming but we as consumers of that tech are in major transitions of our own. It has as much to do with demographics as technology. So while I’ll be looking ahead all this week, coming up with the usual 10 predictions, I want to make sure we all understand that this isn’t business as usual. This […]

By |February 25th, 2019|2019, Predictions, Uncategorized|72 Comments
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