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Cringely's 2002 Predictions
An anonymous reader submitted Cringley's
2002 predictions. Nothing totally
unexpected: XML will explode (hasn't it already?) and Microsoft will
keep their mits in every big deal in the tech industry. Other stuff
too, like the return of VCs and IPO frenzies (yawn), and that Rich
Media won't quite make it yet in 2002.
This from the man who agreed with Steve Gibson about how raw sockets in WinXP was going to destroy the internet. Seeing as how slashdot still exists, I think he may be just a little bit off base.
Gawyn
Freedom of Speech?
2001's predictions
he might be 70% right on the obvious stuff, but his stock predictions are 0% right, so I won't take any notice of the new ones
Mmmmmmm
Will the MP4 format have copy protection? And will it be really cool? And will it be released multi-platform? All these and more....
Everything is mainstream now.
Maybe he doesn't research his predictions very well, but Covad pulled out of Bankruptcy..
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
You shouldn't trust him, as he most likely views his predictions thing as nothing more than a game, and certainly doesn't take them seriously himself. If he did, he'd have sold his MS stock and bought lots of Cisco. That or he's lying about the Cisco stock that he supposedly does not own.
However, since he said he sat at the sales division meeting, wouldn't that mean that he had some stock, or maybe they just invited him for the hell of it.
Gawyn
Freedom of Speech?
Look for further stratification as the banks come to realize that Redmond's goal is to take a piece of every online transaction, which is to say Microsoft intends to steal the banks' business.
I'm not sure many banks will see it that way, at least initially. I'm sure many will see this as a standardization push which will increase user spending online, meaning more transactions, and banks will still get a cut of transactions (maybe less if MS is taking a cut too). Is a smaller share of a larger userbase greater than a larger share of a smaller userbase? I think banks will pick the former...
creation science book
What I got wrong the last time out was I wrote that the recession would be over by now, that Microsoft would be a bad stock to own, and that Cisco would be a good one.
.BOOM. With their price low (around $20 currently), don't look for CSCO to have a way to continue their old strategy. also, though a large percentage of the internet runs on their equipment, during a slow recession cycle, look for companies to hold their equip a little longer than previously. couple that with the fact that swtiches, routers, etc don't need constant upgrades like PCs and Servers and you are looking at a slow growth year for CSCO.
Finally, I think last year's prediction for Cisco Systems will come true this year. I wrote "The answer to every problem with the Internet will continue to be 'pay more money to Cisco.' At current prices[emphasis mine] the stock is a bargain."
there are a lot of things Cringley is - an asute business man, he is not. CSCO was at a high around $86 in Sept 2000. That was the pinnacle for the company. Since then it has been proven that their plan to buy small companies - 20 to 25 a year - was not a fantastic growth plan for the
so is $20 a good price to get in on? prolly - but it isn't going to pop and hit $80 in the next 12 months, so as long as that is not your plan, sure, by some. i avg'd down in nov. if you own some CSCO this is a prime time to do that.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
Other stuff too, like the return of VCs and IPO frenzies (yawn)
How can you yawn at that idea? Obviously you don't live in work in the real world if you find the idea of the tech industry rebounding and causing hoards of cash to be thrown back into it boring!!!
HERE
whole slew of trained monekys read them and choose.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
Microsoft will keep their mits in every big deal in the tech industry.
Hmm. I'm surprised this article wasn't from the loking-in-the-crystal-bal dept.
mit
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
All of our inter-application communications and middleware uses XML. It makes it much easier to code new applications without knowing the people who coded the old ones. :-)
...are just educated extrapolated from the past.
Frankly, I think that predictions on business trends and technology are the toughest to make since in the past ten years or so things have changed so darn quickly. If anything, the old rules of business still apply, but with some new loopholes and tricks being found by avid entrepeneurs. To predict the direction of technology right now though is sheer guesswork.
From what cringely says in the article, it seems that he is completely ignoring the most important issues of physical infrastructure, market appeal, consumer demand, and even the continually growing influence of open-source and other public developments in technology. Despite the apparent 'lock-in' of proprietary technologies, I'm betting that most of mr. cringley's predictions will be stimied by the significant development of truly interoperable software, much of which will be contributed by the open-source community.
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
I'm not implying that there's no problems with raw sockets, any time that you give users a higher-gauge shotgun (in the form an OS) aimed at their foot, you're causing more problems.
However, the solution is not to remove raw sockets, it's to (a) forcibly educate the users, such as making them run through a tutorial on first-boot from a PC, or (b) lock down the system, instead of leaving it open, like MS typically does.
I'm definitely sure there will be WinXP DDoS attacks, I know enough about network security and the like to think there won't be, but it'll be nowhere near the catastrophic levels predicted by Gibon, Cringley, and groupies.
Gawyn
Freedom of Speech?
... I'm just wondering whether the right social factors are in place for a broad-based uptake of XML. The real advance of the web IMHO is not w3c/AOL/etc but the IETF with its RFCs ... this allows companies, consortiums and even consumers to describe a protocol, and let the free market compete to provide implementations. Witness BXXP (or now renamed beepcore) which has Java, TCL, Ruby, etc libraries as well as C/C++ reference.
Now look at the same issue with DTDs. The fundamental constraints are that they are industry specific, tied to specific domain knowledge and it takes a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to come to consensus. Once a DTD is officially published, then modifying/varying it can be difficult. For example, I wanted to modify the XBEL (XML bookmark exchange) to add in a deprecate-by date field but it would be incompatible with all the existing implementations. Trying to work with large industry standards would be even more cumbersome as there are so many entrenched interests (just look at the proliferation of billing-based XML). How do large groups resolve the negotiations and compatibility issues (and talking about sub-schemas is another can-of-worms), not to mention the ontological definitions of any specialised language corpus (witness the biological community trying to define items in a rapidly moving field). XML might be the currency of computer originated messages but who guarantees its inter-convertibility (present and future)? For a XML based application to work seamlessly, cooperative structures that span multiple groups probably need to be established. While corporates would be more than willing to set forward, general mistrust based on past misbehaviour does not auger well for wide-spread uptake of the technology. How do you know whether that biz-talk or TLA of-the-day is not secretly sending out sensitive information? And if technical guys are dubious about security, how can you expect consumers to embrace something which is beyond their understanding and has little immediate benefits (XML IMHO is more useful for computer-computer transactions than computer-human).
The real revolution with XML will be social, not technological.
LL
At least that's the theory.
It will take new markets for new services to truly make the semantic web, and hence XML, necessary. Meta-auctions might be one such services, but the big auction players are doing a good job of keeping such services from collecting data.
My prediction for 2002 is that linux will push out the other unices in everything but the top tier of serving needs, and that Microsoft will own everything else. Apple will sink beneath 5% userbase as most home users back off from its increasingly expensive (relative to PCs) machines.
IBM will also back off of linux somewhat in 2002 as it fails to bring home substantial new incomes for the company.
Red Hat will wipe out the other distros.
One of Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft will leave the console market.
2. Linux will continue to be no more than a sliver of 1% of the desktop.
3. Linuxites will misunderstand the reasons for both 1 and 2, and will argue about them endlessly on slashdot.
However, the solution is not to remove raw sockets, it's to (a) forcibly educate the users, such as making them run through a tutorial on first- boot from a PC, or (b) lock down the system, instead of leaving it open, like MS typically does.
The real solution is at the ISP levels: All ISPs should be mandated (at risk of being held accountable due to negligence for financial loss held by others) to filter out IP spoofing -> If someone is sending out packets from the address a.b.c.d and you know that they're z.y.x.w then shut down their connection or at lest filter the packets out. The whole idea of IP spoofing is absurd. The same holds true for any other manner of malformed packets: They should be dropped at the first router they hit.
Not really -- Covad filed what is known as a prepackaged bankruptcy (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-000064425aug08 .story) , where the debt holders have already agreed to trade some or all of their debt for equity and some cash, reducing the amount of debt service the company had to support. From where I'm sitting, there was no question that Covad would reemerge from bankruptcy.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
I haven't paid attention to this guy in the past, but WOW! Why is this bunch of random guesses (about 20% of the total number) and obvious "predictions" even being looked at? He says that he is right 90% of the time, which seems suspiciously like a record of window's uptime reliability, in that with the system given, it should be much higher if it were any good.
If all of his predictions were not obvious, and he got even 50% of them right, I would be impressed, but he seems to be using techniques perfected by fortunetellers centuries ago: make a couple of obvious predictions, and a couple of guesses with almost no basis, and then when a couple of the wild guesses come true, parade them around while ignoring the huge rate of incorrect guesses, and even using statistics to "show" that he makes good guesses.
What a load of bull, and we all seem to pay attention anyways!
I'm a concientious
Just about every ISP worth the money you pay per month does this. I'm not sure how many ISPs do filter, but it's a very simple, one line addition to the Cisco routers, to check to see if the source IP is within it's IP pool. If not, then you can either discard and ignore the packets, or discard and flag them, based on repeat offenders, and from there, track down which user is sending them and inform them of this.
Gawyn
Freedom of Speech?
I know I read Slashdot, but still, here's my immediate future:
- I haven't upgraded my Win2K to WinXP and probably won't. My next box may in fact be an Apple OSX machine. It's sexier and Unix.
- My Mom and my brother (both newbies) haven't and won't upgrade to XP either because they don't have the cash or any real reason.
- I'd choose a PS2 instead of XBox if only for the bigger library of games.
- I still use my Palm Vx and when I upgrade in the next year, it'll probably be to a Symbian "Smartphone" or a Palm phone. No PocketPC here and no "Stinger."
- I'm a consultant who uses Java mostly and have no use for
.NET - and when I recommend solutions to clients, I stear them away from trapping themselves with a M$ solution.
- I come from the fantastic state of California which hasn't given in to any settlement yet with Microsoft and hopefully won't until there's some real damage done.
What more can I say - it doesn't look rosy for Micosoft at all from my vantage point. Then again, this is only my experience, but it's the only real data I have to go by... Hey, Win2K is great to use, nice and stable and my Microsoft Wheel Mouse with the infred sensor on the bottom just plain rocks. But those were yesterday's purchases. In the coming year, I can see M$ playing much less a role in my life not more.Just my thoughts,
-Russ
Me
You Know You've Been Working In The Computer Industry Too Long When:
Which reminds me...
I
predict
that
by
2003,
Tom's
Hardware
articles
will
have
only
one
word
of
text
per
pageview.
RE: " 10. Finally, I think last year's prediction for Cisco Systems will come true this year. I wrote "The answer to every problem with the Internet will continue to be 'pay more money to Cisco.' At current prices the stock is a bargain."
No, I don't own any Cisco stock."
All his predictions are XML, Microsoft and Cisco related. Here's what's really gonna happen as far as business computing:
1) Broadband for the masses will continue to tread water due to bankruptcies, less competition, rising prices and little to no progress on the main technological barriers. Economies of scale due to consolidation will not happen and everyone who writes for PC World and online media will wonder why.
2) The ASP market will no longer be dynamic. After the release of Windows XP, every IT department and individual consumer will be able to realize that virtually no operating system innovations have occurred and that will force people to keep their doors open. Long term commitments will become apparent and begin to happen. Software (even game) manufacturers will realize that PC computing consumers' purchasing power and awareness/savvy has hit a critical mass where the risk/reward ratio for software development will become worth it for product development even if the revenue produced is not a home run.
Just my opinion.....
Fair disclosure: I do own and have owned Cisco stock and call options.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Companies will continue to develop products that nobody needs nor wants. They'll all go behind schedule and over budget. Most of the projects will be mercy-killed before they even start to work. The few that make it to the store shelves will be ultra-niche items that cost 4x more than anyone would even dream of paying for them.
The companies that lose millions on these products will just scratch their heads, blame the economy, and start designing all over again.
The lucky ones will go out of business.
Guess so. Took the contents of the message too. Well, that was a wasted 10 minutes.
and yeah, I'd call that a bug.
XML will explode
...killing everyone inside.
G.
One of Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft will leave the console market.
Unlikely.
Sony won't leave because they clearly have an edge on the market with their one year head start, large game library, and deals with Konami and Square for Metal Gear and Final Fantasy games.
Nintendo won't leave because they have done well enough so far and still have their best games in the works (the new Zelda game, new Metroid game, new Mario game, etc.).
Microsoft will perform the worst in the console market and probably should leave soonest, but they won't because Microsoft is stubborn and has the money to burn to try to make the XBox work. They will eventually leave, but not in 2002, unless they come up with a killer app somehow (though I still wouldn't want to play it given that their controllers have the poorest design I've ever seen).
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Are these predictions for the coming year or a synopsis of 2001?
Guess you can't be wrong in restating the obvious.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Cringe's articles, are available as a slashbox. Coincidentally, one that I have as a default for my account.
Why is it, that we "need" every weekly article of his, posted as a front page story. Don'tcha think that the people that want to read him already are anyhow?
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I was surprised that Cringely didn't mention the seemingly ubiquitous OS wars.
There are so many people convinced of one or both of the following: that Microsoft sucks; and that Linux will rule the desktop.
What is unfortunate about these viewpoints is that it obscures the real issue, which is making better software.
The industry has been crying out for a "killer app" for about 8 months. Basically, there are no reasons for people to upgrade their computer. But instead of really trying to make the "killer app", the Linux community is focused on:
-- emulating Microsoft, which is similar to those Wile E. Coyote cartoons, with Microsoft as the Roadrunner always being "one step ahead..."
-- trying to convince people that Microsoft sucks and that Linux is really better.
How about a New Years resolution for the Slashdot community? "For every comment I write on Slashdot, I will write at least 100 lines of code for an application that I believe will truly change the world. For every time I bash Microsoft for having poor security or buggy applications, I will contribute half an hour of my time to a project that I believe can truly succeed in a market dominated by Microsoft."
Remember, any executive will tell you that "This other product sucks" is a terrible business plan. However, "I have a plan to make x product more secure" is a great idea. And you don't need to be a programmer to change the world -- any good project needs marketing and donations and general help to succeed. It may be as simple as walking a newbie through the setup procedure or canvassing a message board looking for people who need help and offering to help them.
Here's my shocking prediction: in 5 years, the OS wars won't matter. Why is that? Not because Microsoft has been stomped, but because the world will have moved on. Look at TiVo, for instance. It runs Linux. So what? I don't get a bash prompt when I turn it on; I get a useful device that does exactly what I want to do. The fact that it runs Linux doesn't matter to the vast majority of TiVo subscribers.
Remember, people don't want something that has this feature or that feature. They want something that will solve an immediate need. Businesses are the same way. Prove that your solution will solve an existing and immediate need, and you're hired -- regardless of whether you're using Windows 2000, Linux, or a commercial UNIX to solve the problem.
So go out there and create that killer app, and stop arguing about whether Linux is this or that. I'm telling you, in 5 years, the Linux vs. Microsoft wars will be moot, but the killer application need will still be there. Don't argue about the platform; argue about whether your users' needs are being fulfilled.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Why do the DDoS attacks need to be spoofed?
It seems to me that a clever outlook worm, i.e. one that attached itself to valid outgoing attachments, could infect a large number of machines and simply begin making valid http requests to a few servers could be sufficient.. Enough machines requesting enough data will drop any connection to it's knees..
A DDoS attack is damaging, either spoofed or non-spoofed, but Gibson's main premise is that, with the inclusion of raw sockets into WinXP, spoofed DDoS attacks will conquer the internet, be untraceable and unblockable, and generally bring around the end of the world as we know it.
For more info on paranoia, read here. Then, before the marketing spin catches a hold of your soul, read here.
Gawyn
Freedom of Speech?
IP spoofing has legitimate uses when you have connections through two different ISPs and have situations where it makes sense to have stuff route in over one and then route out via the other, but identifying itself so that the responses come in via the first one again. For a good reference on when this is useful, see Matthew Marsh's Policy Routing Using Linux.
Your suggestion is in line with the basic Microsoft approach: take power away from the user; dumb down the options. Yet as we well know, that approach in practice hardly makes us more safe!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Slashdot will link to every article written by Bob Cringely in 2002. Bob Cringely will start writing for Slashdot, under a level two pseudonym. This post will receive a +5 funny.
I think what Cringely said was that Microsoft left this hole open intentionally in order to create that "super worm". Then when the worm actually appears, to use that as a pretext to ditch the insecure TCP/IP protocol that allowed such a worm to be spawned (this is MS talking, mind you), and move to a more secure MS-TCP or MS-IPv6. And that will be the death of the internet.
Far fetched I know, but similar things have been tried before.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
However, the solution is not to remove raw sockets, it's to (a) forcibly educate the users, such as making them run through a tutorial on first-boot from a PC, or (b) lock down the system, instead of leaving it open, like MS typically does.
Keep in mind that XP is a rework of NT/2000 into a desktop OS.
MS didn't forget to secure XP, they broke the security on purpose for greater compatibility with 95/98 apps (which have no user-level security whatsoever.)
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Don't you pronounce XML as "eXzeeMaL"?
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
XML will explode (hasn't it already?)
Hardly. Slashdot doesn't even have an XML version of the messages or stories, only the headlines.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Maybe you should just moderate this as redundant, since I've posted it in several other Cringely-based stories on /.:
/. start page by editing your user preferences.
::Colz Grigor
You can add the I, Cringely slashbox to your
And slashboxes ought to have comments/discussions associated with them by default, so Anonymous Cowards don't have to submit every darn Cringely article as a story.
Which has nothing to do with raw sockets. Unix allows raw sockets - if you're root. NT allows raw sockets - if you're in the administrators group. XP allows raw sockets - if you're an administrator which for the default home setup means everybody.
I honestly don't get the people who say raw sockets are a security problem. By their arguments, everyone should be forced to use a private, proprietary network behind custom proxy servers, like AOL used to be, so they can't get out onto the raw internet and wreak havoc. Back before AOL became Yet Another ISP, it was darned difficult to launch script kiddie attacks from there against actual Internet sites....
I would scream bloody murder if the Linux gods took raw sockets away from me. Not that they'd be stupid enough to even think about that. Nobody questions the usefulness of tcpdump, which relies on raw sockets.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
In fact, its hard to argue that OSX or Linux or Solaris is "unix" anymore by the classical definition of a small simple OS with tools that communicate over the simplest of protocols - the pipe (lifted from "The Unix Philosphy", by Mike Gancraz). Linux is already moving towards component architectures, and the rest of the unix-like systems globbed on so much additional functionality that they left "simple" behind long ago.
I argue that Windows 2000 can be made to be as much like whatver you see of unix in Linux, which I further argue is in name only.
Wow! Yet more proof that Robert Cringely is an idiot of legendary proportions and doesn't know a *damn* thing about anything of importance happening in computing today (or even yesterday). I think he and John Dvorak are soon to have a competition in making the least substantive comments about computing any human has ever uttered.
All these "forcasts" are stuff that is either non-important, or was obvious to even the most dim-witted long ago.
The format is only 1/3 of the battle. Agreeing on content arrangments/rules is the tricky part:
I agree that content arrangment and rules are still a big part of the piece, but with XML and XML tranformation, you can accept different arragments and rules from different people, which makes it pooploads more versatile than EDI.
Please don't misunderstand me and think that I'm suggesting that companies should accommodate every other companies subtile rules. Rather, I'm suggesting if one, two, or 5 have different formats and rules, XML transformation should be able to handle it.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
(* Rather, I'm suggesting if one, two, or 5 have different formats and rules, XML transformation should be able to handle it. *)
Example? In my experience it is a matter of human communication and negotiation, not a magic algorithmic
I wasn't suggesting that XML tranformation is a magic algorithm that doesn't require user intervention. You need a person to explain to the software how to transform from one format to one your system can digest, which is current done with XSLT.
While this isn't a magic algorithm, it provides just enough technology to allow companies to develop newer/better standards while providing a means to support existing systems, making it A LOT more flexible than EDI.
Of course (and it goes without saying), it ALL relies on some basic human negotiation and communication. However, Unlike EDI, you'll find you'll need a lot less negotiation regarding HOW you send the information, but rather WHAT information.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce