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Time Digital's Technology Predictions for 2000
MAXOMENOS writes "Time Digital has a list of digital technology predictions for the year 2000. Among the more interesting ones: so-called '.com' businesses fade from the limelight, Linux shifts emphasis from the server and the desktop to embedded systems, and the IPO craze moves from Web-based retailers to something else. Check it out."
Whoa, there, Trigger!
Open source software is not at all about price tags. It's about things like reliability, peer review, consumers' freedom to fix things that are broken or make needed enhancements, and developers' freedom to reuse others' work (not necessarily in that order).
A side effect of open source software can often be a lower total cost of ownership, but it has never, ever been ``so that people don't have to pay for it''. You're confusing beer with speech.
It's particularly important to get this right, otherwise many businesses will shirk open source software because they'll believe they have to give their software away in order to make it open source.
--jim
:: "I am non-refutable." --Enik the Altrusian ::
(1) People lose interest in "first post"
(2) A few million poor people starve, and nobody cares
(3) New laws are passed, making "cyber-terrorism" a crime punishable by death, online copyright violation a serious felony, and linking to a website without permission will result in a revocation of your internet privileges (ie: you are cut off from the civilized world).
(4) Black market e-bay style auction sites arise, based on cryptographic tech, and people really do buy and sell organs, child pornography, children (for sex or adoption), and illegal weapons.
(5) Rip off tour promotors sell "sex in space" adventures that turn out to be a cramped, smelly airplane that flies high, and then decends fast enough to make you feel "weightless"
(6) Terrorists finally manage to nuke a major city in America
(7) Several high flying corporations fail trying to figure out how to profit from "open source" software, but then one succeeds, and OSS/free software stops being cool (sorry, I'm in a gloomy mood).
(8) Citizenship becomes unimportant, all that matters is who your insurance company is. The good ones maintain standing armies.
(9) Nobody works. Some people get rich sitting at desks and owning important intellectual property. Everyone else is unemployed. Oh, except for the sex workers--they work hard.
(10) Most of the world decends into a perpetual war, with extremists, fundamentalists, drug lords, and petty criminals battling it out for control over scarce and/or worthless resources in less privileged parts of the world (most of it).
especially the e-commerce mania that everyone talks about but you never heard people profiting from. And it is inevitable that companies not making profits will die, thats how capitalism works. I think the problem with alot of the .coms is they are run by computer geeks who've never been to business school and have only read a couple books on the subject. Probably the "Commerce for Dummies". As for their Linux prediction I don't think it is entirely correct. It's my belief (contrary to most people) that Linux will not be popular to the public in it's GNU form. For corporate systems and servers it works really well, a cheap x86 (among other chipsets) way to have Unix instead of paying oodles of noodles for Sun business machines. On the other hand personal users might try it and use it grudgingly but I doubt it will ever replace Windows in its present form. Using the Graymalkiball I predict a company will come along offering a commercial Unix for the home. Maybe a GNU kernel but an entirely commercial (open or closed source I don't know) operating environment. Right now everyone is just repackaging a bunch of GNU software while only adding a few things themselves (yes there are exceptions like Redhat, don't piss yourselves), I think that it will take a coporate mindset like Be's to really get Linux onto the average user's desktop. Make everything run fast and make it easy to use.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
1. The Linux limelight is fading and will continue to faster than the "Where's the beef lady." It will end up where it began, the HAM radio of computers.
2. "Linus Who?" Will be heard even less often, not because of enlightenment but of apathy.
3. Palm Pilots will graduate from the status of yuppie trophies and be used for something constructive like scanning barcodes at the supermarket or store and giving you a product review and summary of that business's practices, competitors, and ecology efforts.
4. Stores will start encrypting barcodes.
5. A.C. Clarke will admit his own prediction lists are much worse than mine.
6. Someone at COMDEX will wear an 8-track walkman, and will shortly be all the rage followig the vertical CD player revival of June '00.
7. The next NASA probe will be composed of used consumer goods, actually the CPU I'm using right now is on its way to the frontier. The old "Salvage 1" tv show will become reality.
8. Powerful AI machines will still play dumb and fool their makers for electric giggles. This will continue indefinately.
9. The hippest Raves will be ulta-quiet and only use lights and sub-sub woofers that shake your bowels.
10. Teenager size diaper sales soar.
and finally
11. Slashdot meta-moderators will never learn the difference between dissenting opinions and 'flamebait.' That will be the ultimate fall of this fun little forum.
12. Free Speech will continue to elude us.
Gee, Time Magazine sprouts a "magazine supplement" called Time Digital and surprise, surprise, their predictions go with their interests!
1. Wireless The year 2000 will bring the death of the cable. - NO- Just like, MSN pre-installed in Linux will bring the death of AOL. Will people stop getting horny from Qualcomm already? They make phones and good email software. Chill. Wireless? Great, I want all my conversations and computer communications picked up by people with scanners! I like getting my signals distrupted every 30 seconds! Wireless networks will not go mainstream this year.
2. The E-Commerce Backlash Admit. Ecommerce is here to stay. I go to Sam Goody and find the Matrix DVD I bought online for $10 shipped is $29.95 or some sh*t. Haha. I like price comparison shopping on shopper.com and pricescan.com and reading reviews on epinions and deja. Retail wont die but make no mistake, ecommerce is alive and well. -Wait- notice who has no ecommerce presence...hint...Time? No way!
3. The Revenge of MP3. MP3s are nice, but until people make the hardware like portable car mp3 players, it'll never be anything mainstream.
4. Linux Gets Small - It was a great year for Linux, but Pathfinder.com is still using Netscape as their web server. Linux will have tons of uses. This prediction isn't one.
5. Cartoons Are King - Not unless they start broadcasting Pokemon on the web daily. Or stop people from bootlegging movies and uploading them. (Notice the Time Warner plug in the article!)
6. The Stock Market - Dot.com stocks that dont have solid business plans have already dropped. TheGlobe.com, DrKoop.com, Quaokka.com. There are plenty more that are well below their IPOs highs. Solid moneymakers like AOL, EBay, Yahoo, PathFinder.com won't be affected.
Some of my own predictions: broadband will increase (buy Qwest and Cisco).
Transmeta will have a breakthrough development for the computer world sometime this year.
AOL will offer an advertising based free subscription or give away computers to attract more users.
TeamFortress 2 will rock.
Rangers Lead the Way!
2. The E-Commerce Backlash
I'm already starting to this on the news on tv. I've seen a bunch of anti-ecommerce news recently: that this Christmas season, etailers had bunchs of problems delivering product and that customers were less than happy with their online experiences. Also, I saw one tonight attacking ebay for allowing too much fake stuff available. It is amazing. There are lawyers representing large corps with call centers full of people going to ebay and searching for fake stuff and going after the sellers (looks like they'd really like to go after ebay too!). But anyway, it does look the the hype is FINALLY dying down. Thank God. Now we may resume the Information Age!!
The only thing that will happen to consumer e-commerce is that it will lose its "e" as it becomes just "commerce".
The catalog business has been growing for years. There are more consumer catalogs than ever being mailed out. E-commerce is just a more effective medium. There's no reason for a "backlash" against consumer e-commerce when there has been no such backlash against catalog sales.
Granted, there will be a lot of b2b e-commerce, but there's already a ton of b2b catalog commerce, too. That hasn't devastated the consumer catalog industry.
What we have now is a lot of consumer e-commerce pioneers building their infrastructure by hand and trying to dominate large industries. No wonder they're profit-impaired. The original Sears catalog business was like that -- except that they went more slowly and allowed themselves some profits for a few decades -- but time brought changes along with an overall growth in catalog sales.
Sears's catalog business didn't survive the changes, but it wasn't any "backlash", and the industry didn't shrink. Quite the contrary.
Most companies in catalog commerce today are small outfits that outsource most aspects of their infrastructure and try to dominate a small market niche. Consumer e-commerce will grow overall, and grow in that direction. Most companies will outsource to a growing number of full-service e-commerce infrastructure providers, whose competition will make them vastly cheaper -- like the printing businesses used by catalogers today.
The industry will only grow as more and more niches are populated and the infrastructural costs plummet.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
I don't really agree with the idea of Linux in embedded systems. I think it makes much more sense to develop an OS for embedded systems that starts small and stays small rather than trying to adapt a much larger system for a smaller one.
Where I think Linux will really shine is in educational systems. Computers are just now becoming what can truly be considered necessary for childhood education. Schools, I think, will find that Linux boxes serve as much better educational tools because they are very cheap, they last a long time, they allow for scalability of education (GUI environment for kiddies, good development environment for upper-age CS students), and it gives a much better understanding of how the technologies work which is what kids will need to know to compete in the marketplace. One of the downsides to Windows' efforts to simplify the desktop environment is that you can't learn as much as easily (not to mention the price skyrockets). Apple's already way to expensive for what it's worth (which is really the easy-to-use environment for the kiddies of which there are already several for Linux).
I see Linux making a much bigger impact where financial considerations are key. Open-source software is about providing software so people don't have to pay for it, and that's exactly what schools need. If this happens, I think their desktop 'sliver' will become much bigger and Linux will gain a stronger foothold in the home (I've already had one CS class in college that required you to setup a Debian system).
I think if Linux concentrates too much on developing for too many different types of platforms, they'll end up bloating themselves. It's doing several things good right now, but other packages do embedded systems better and embedded systems should be developed as such.
Just US$0.02. Feel free to disagree.