Cringley Asking for 12 Month Predictions

sckienle writes "Robert X. Cringely is asking in his pulpit this week for help in determining what's going to happen in the tech industry in the next 12 months." I expect that robots will take over the world, and openly hunt humans in a post apocolyptic landscape. This will occur in January. For the rest of the year, technology will take a vacation.

Comments

Cringley Category

[gorsh]

I know it's been asked before, but since it seems like Slashdot posts a news story about the Cringely column every week, there's no good reason these stories don't belong in their own category, as I'm sure many readers already read these on their own every week and don't need to be reminded of it.

Hold Envelope to forehead

[Matey-O]

I predict a large company will make an existing product smaller, and double the number of features for 90% of the current price.

I also predict that 99% of the people that BUY that product will be unaware that those features exist and consequently not use them.

I preduct the people least likely to use those features will buy that product because 'It's pretty'.

What's going to happen?

[doomy]

Well, the obvious choises are .. XP 2 or 2003, Mandrake/Redhat Z (where Z>7), OS X.A (Where A>1).

Now the serious stuff.

As Cringley likes to say Wifi would be more wide spread, I believe 802.11g would come out and outdate all other wireless lan technologies. Along with that, we'd see increasing number of community free wireless networks (That might or might not be connected to the Net).

America would skip the whole little-phone-philia, instead we'd be into bigger more bulky gadgets. I believe, the PDA's would get better batteries and thus would slowly start replacing phones (probably the biz ppl and young kids first).

Satellite based radio's would die and we'd see some nice shows on the sky when they fall out (just like the Iradium). This means Sirrus and XM. The cause for this would be better compression technologies and the recent opening of a spread spectrum by FCC that lets higher bandwith be sent over the airwaves. Stations would start to pump out studio (not cd as a /. story mentioned) quality audio out soon.

We'll also see a revival of the Dot com like companies, but this would be a more apprehensive revial, companies would be more conservative and we'd see most invetment into technology related with Games (console) and Porn. The old sex and violence.

IPV6 would be postponned and in return we'd see the invention of more and more firewalling/masqurading gadgets, routers would come firewalling/masqurading built in, people would start living within private networks.

Laws would be passed to ban P2P and such similar technologies, but these laws could not be enforced due to jurastiction issues and technology issues. The ppl who'd get hurt in the end would be those sharing files, they might get raided and sentenced. Those who make these software would be out of harms way. We'd see a reduction in the amount of spy ware due to community backlash.

Superman hype would create more superman games and gadgets. (Seriously).

We'll go on war, but our military research facilities would create enough products to stimulate the stangnent information market. Even though this technology would come into the commerical maket 25 years from the time it's created.

We'd see a decline in movie goers... DVD's would be released region free, but with hardware copyright devices.

Slashdot would continue to post these stories. And Cringley would be just himself and ranting like this.

Re:Major war - RIAA/MPAA vs Usenet

[Reality Master 101]

I wonder why this hasn't happened earlier

I'll tell you why -- and it's a good lesson to understand about this battle.

The music industry doesn't care about shutting down every avenue of music trading, they care about music trading that is easy to use by normal people. Napster was the first application that made anonymous music trading easy to use by anyone. Usenet is NEVER going to be used by normal people, because there's no possibility for an instantaneous "search and download" capability.