2011 prediction #7: Microsoft is the new IBM

Microsoft isn’t going away, but they aren’t going to do a lot of things right in 2011, either. The company’s leadership is stuck, complacent, and just a bit thick. We’ve seen a lot of flux in the executive ranks reporting to CEO Steve Ballmer and I think that’s mainly because Ballmer won’t get out of the way. There is no upward mobility path so people leave. But don’t expect Ballmer to leave in 2011, either, which means more mediocrity. So Microsoft will continue to be a huge presence, but not feared in the industry the way they used to be. They’ve become the new IBM.

Windows Phone 7 is almost there, for example, but almost isn’t […]

By |January 6th, 2011|2011|48 Comments
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2011 prediction #6: Yahoo barfs

This is a sad one.  Venerable Yahoo, the original web portal, is in such trouble that it doesn’t know what to do.  So Yahoo will this year begin tearing itself apart.

This will be presented as a semblance of a strategy but I doubt that’s true.  More likely it will be the company attempting to maintain or even increase earnings by selling its seed corn. So look for Yahoo to dispose of its huge assets in China, to sell the part that it owns of Yahoo Japan, and to spin-off photo-sharing site Flickr as a separate company.

It will make the stock look great… for awhile.

By |January 5th, 2011|2011|23 Comments
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2011 prediction #5: Facebook forks

Facebook now claims more than 500 million members. Facebook is too big. Already we’re seeing Facebook defections by, well, me. And others, there are other people than me who are put-off by the simple fact that this social network is becoming as ubiquitous as bad breath in dogs.

LinkedIn, at only 80 million members, is already having success with its branding as the working professional’s Facebook. Well the real Facebook can’t allow that, can they?

So expect this year a Facebook fork with the social network offering premium services to get back all those high earners over at LinkedIn. We may see several Facebook channels in fact. How else can Zuckerberg appeal to those of us who, like Groucho Marx, “refuse to join any club that […]

By |January 4th, 2011|2011|28 Comments
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2011 prediction #4: Bufferbloat may be terrible, but your cable ISP won't fix it

As explained ad nauseam in prediction #1, bufferbloat is going to be a growing problem this year as Windows XP machines are replaced and more people are downloading Internet video. But terrible latency, jitter, and dropouts may not be all bad if you are a cable ISP. That’s because cable ISPs are first and foremost cable television providers and the main victims of bufferbloat are video services like Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube that have become the natural enemies of cable TV. Cable video-on-demand services, while also digital, use separately-provisioned bandwidth and sometimes even different signaling technology, so the ISP’s competitor to Netflix isn’t bothered by bufferbloat at all.

Bufferbloat also affects BitTorrent, which ISPs hate, though they’d hate it a lot less if they’d eliminate […]

By |January 4th, 2011|2011|29 Comments
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2011 prediction #3: 1.8-inch and 3.5-inch disk drives will die

This year will see the end of the iPod Classic and with it the 1.8-inch disk drive, 90 percent of which are sold by Toshiba. This is a testament to the rise of flash memory and Solid State Disk (SSD) drives, but that’s not the only cause or the only result, because I predict that late in the year the venerable 3.5-inch disk form factor will hit end-of-life, too.

Apple is by far the largest consumer of 1.8-inch disk drives with most of the rest going into competing media players and netbooks. Toshiba might be able to keep its 1.8-inch disk business going to serve those alternate markets but I don’t think Apple will allow it, […]

By |January 4th, 2011|2011|53 Comments
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