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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.
I predict that sometime in the next 12 months, someone will release software that lets Mac OS X users make perfect copies of DVDs. Since OS X is enough under the 'radar' of the MS-lovin' types, they don't notice until millions of people get a copy of the application.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
I wonder why this hasn't happened earlier - I think someone evil is finally going to notice that Usenet is 95% warez/moviez, and go after the big companies that run Usenet servers. This will probably happen after someone makes a tool that allows for easy use of Usenet, ie, a "download, unpar, unrar" tool, that keeps track of binary groups.
BBK
Sub $25 Wireless networking setup, including router and card.
No major new operating system.
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Chickens will come home to roost. IT departments will continue to try and recoup their huge investments in technology made
during the boom.
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The year of picking up the pieces and moving on....
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Actually, Hobby Robotic development will make great strides with several new product announcements all which will come out at an affordable price in 2004.
There's so much room for extending upon the Lego Mindstorms concept and product.
Let's see how close he was... Anyone got a link?
what's going to happen in the tech industry in the next 12 months
/. will repost many of the articles from today in the next several months (sorry, had to say it) :-)
More than likely, a lot of what is happening already, just in a slight variation.
Manufacturers of video cards, CPU's etc will bring out something that's newer, faster, etc, touting it over the competion. The CPU may be faster, but will be held down by the motherboard/peripheral bottleneck. To some extent the same will apply to the video card.
Meanwhile, large companies will be looking for ways to take down users pirating their wares, and pirates will be looking for better/different ways to exchange those wares and or crack them.
Hammer may come out, but again, for those who aren't currently hitting the limits of their PC's it's not really such a big deal.
Summary: Sold old stuff, new marketing, somewhat faster.
Oh, and chances are
Skynet isn't due for another 27 years, in 2029, so nothing really exciting there - phorm
in the next 36 months or less
Very fast DNA sequencing, someone has produced a decice that sequencies DNA by measuring the energy as it splits.
Fast protiens sequensing for medical research using techniques developed by the Nobel Prize for Chemistry winners.
In the Next 10 years, combining the two.
In the next 12 months I see the arrival of *the* Linux Home Desktop Distro. I have no clue as to who will provide it, but the media is going to love it, the schools will love it, I will love it, and mostly everyone on Slashdot will hate it.
Copyright law will still be here, with the 20 year extension.
DRM will pass, and start to be implemented in technology, causing major problems to the tech industry.
Someone major in the Linux community will go to a great deal of trouble to Break the DMCA, and circumvent the mandatory DRM. They will do this in a public arena, and be arrested. People will protest, but they will still be in jail in 12 months.
Computers connecting to the internet must have some sort of DRM installed in their hardware. This will cause everyone to upgrade their hardware. This will raise the tech sector out of it's slump. This will also register everyone to a computer.
Some unfounded/unknown company (most likely a small startup) will put together a very inexpensive upgrade kit to bring your current computer into compliance with DRM. This company will make the founders millionaires overnight. They will be filthy rich at the end of this 12 months.
I will drink several beers, sodas, and eat some pizza, not in that particular order.
Commerzbank in germany will come very close to collapsing, bringing the european market down, the dollar and american tech sector will become stronger from this.
Lawn-mowing robots and will quickly find their ways into american yards, faster than cellphones. Their prices will fall to equal that of a riding mower. People will purchase them as they get to be very good quality.
HP will fire Fiona
Televisions, affected by DRM as well, will set a time when people must switch to HDTV recievers. There will again be a company that comes out with conversion kits.
An anonymous coward on slashdot will be moderated as a troll.
Those are my predictions for the forthcoming year! Have a mysteriously spooktacular friday!
First of all the slump in the overall economy will stop any significant new technologies in their crib. If current situation remains the only thing corporations havent saved money on is the IT departments. After they sacked half their staff and factories only IT and management is left to do any larger savings on. They will go after IT and not management for cost cuts. I presume that the biggest IT companies will have a hard time to withstand their high earnings if that will be the case.
On the good side this would open up a new area of buisiness that i think would thrive. Companies like IBM that saves money for their customers will be very popular among corporations.
New computer hardware wont be released with the same pace if no one is buying it. The current pace on uppgrades has been predicted to level off for quite some time now and its about time. At some point hardware is up to par with the tasks performed by 90% of people. The rest 10% cant hold the upgrade pace up by themselves.
HTTP/1.1 400
I'll lose my software engineering job and won't have enough money to buy any technology. Therefore I won't really give a rats ass!
Everything we see these days seems to be an incremental improvement or "synergy" type of product with nothing fantastic showing up.
Of course I see the eventual "StarTrekification" [Copyright currently under attack by Paramount] of about every modern day device we have. PDA's become phones become cameras, become mobile webservers for on the go Amateur Porn actors with built in audio, video, and Solitaire.
These Predictions are invariably insider information about products in the pipeline that were in the think tank not a long time ago and their usefulness is generally overplayed, but they are an easy, attention grabbing headline (you saw it on Slashdot didn't you?)
With all that said, here are a few things that will almost certainly happen on the technology front:
1) PDA/Phone/Camera combo's will do streaming video. No more lugging that mini-dv to your local Movie Pirate... just WiFi it. Hell... we could all watch a movie in real time from Mobile Pirates(tm).
2) FINALLY something useful - fuel cell batteries for everything
3) LCD's will big bigger and cheaper and somehow they'll figure out how to stop streaking in fast motion applications.
4) Foveon CMOS will make it into high-end prosumer palmcorders
5) DVDxR format will be released. Look for the DVD/R drive a year later. Oh, and the "end-all" DVD+-x/R drives from Sony should be due out about a year after that - don't get left behind, each new version is nominally more compatible than the last!
6) Portable Hologram units (ala Star Wars). 'Nuff said.
7) Virtual Porn on PS2/Xbox/Cube... Think Dead Or Alive X-treme Volleyball engine with a few more 'fun' features. This will be the killer app that finally brings Porn to it's intended audience in the way which we all really want - with full control, no lame acting, and in widescreen
8) THX 9.1 Surround Sound. Get it on your PC now!
9) Mac OS XI
10) AMD turns things around with their monster chip (Please... I have a lot of stock!)
I claim copyright on any and all ideas from this day forward... especially the Porn on the Gaming systems (maybe even the PC).
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. -Samuel Johns
Having amazed everyone by creating a sensible, usable Linux desktop environment for the masses, Lindows will clean up the internals of the OS. Installs and post-install configuration will start getting better and better. Sales of pre-loaded Lindows boxes will spread out of the Wal-Mart niche, and the Linux desktop revolution will gain serious steam.
Red Hat will continue their work integrating KDE/Gnome into a single usuable desktop, spurred on by the growing praise for Lindows. Mandrake, currently the king of the desktop Linux world, will go full steam ahead on matching the desktop work that Lindows and Red Hat are doing, throwing another vendor's hat into the make-the-linux-desktop-not-suck ring.
Sun Microsystems will move into the desktop market, giving a familiar hardware name to Linux desktops, making it eaiser for IT staff to bring Linux PCs into their networks. HPQ will do the same, and Dell will rejoin the Linux desktop world to keep up.
Apple will be keeping an eye on this, and keep refining OS X. OS X will gain popularity with the computer users who favor minimal administration. Mac users will learn the value of Open/Free software, and communication between the Mac/Linux world will grow.
Microsoft will sit in the background, watching the TCO of Windows rise and the TCO of Linux drop, and the path for Linux domination will be ready for the world to walk down.
The IT services industry stock will continue to tumble as investors realize a company whose "only asset is its people" has no assets after it has pissed off its people.
The new HP will still only be known for its printers and calculators
Dell will start branding other peripherals not only printers.
Walmart will stop selling Lindows PC's after all of their service lines explode because of an overload of "My AOL CD doesn't install properly" questions
Microsoft will continue to follow the "guidelines" of the federal court judgement, slashdotters will complain, but no-one else will care.
People will continue to make obscure bluetooth devices, but users will only to be able to find bluetooth headphones at any retail outlet.
Tablet PC's will appear, and then fade into the horizon
The Digital Camera Megapixel war will continue, a 11 Megapixel camera will be affordable.
CowboyNeal will appear as all options in a slashdot poll.
Slashdot and X Cringley will have the same article as this one next year and noone will remember this years results.
Gator/Claria is Spyware.
A laptop with an integrated high-resolution projection system instead of an LCD display.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
a) More people will use Ogg Vorbis, and like it, on their personal computers
b) A true standalone hardware player will be introduced, followed by another. Perhaps an iPod upgrade, even.
c) Just as many people as do right now will be able to name 2 audio codecs besides MP3 and Ogg Vorbis -- the same people as can right now, in fact.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
J2ME/MIDP. BREW. Our cell phones are getting brains!
In the next year, I see mobile (cell phones and networked PDA's) code usage exploding. It's already big in the corporate market, where it's running custom enterprise apps. In Eastern Europe, they lack a credit card system, so they beam money from their cell phones. China is coming into its own with telecommunications, and with a huge, unallocated spectrum to play with over there, cell phones get a lot of bandwidth, nice and cheap. Commuters on the Pennsylvania-to-NY trains have four hours to spend doing SOMETHING. Why not learn, play, communicate, or work on their convenient hand-held, networked computing device?
It may or may not be in the U.S., but there's no doubt in my mind that in the next year fully-programmable handsets using J2ME or BREW will come into their own.
Jouster
...and what better way to start than to help launch the tools for helping launch the research?
Stuff that's free for everybody's use should be paid for by the people who expect to benefit from it and want to be a part of it. Free software, basic research, space exploration... all stuff that could be completely funded by small donations from large numbers of interested individuals.
Sure it's awesome to get in there and get your hands dirty, but you can't actually work on every cool project. You could be an important part of each and every one through microdonations.
1) $100 PC
2) Greater PC/TV integration leveraging wireless networking
3) A Fortune 500 company will deploy desktop Linux. A Fortune 100 company will deploy Open Office.
4) Tech hiring will pick up as corps beef up cybersecurity and integrate handhelds into core business processes
5) IBM buys Sun and changes Java to their open source licence
6) Boucher's bill passes, Berman's bill passes (both modified and clarified), while Hollings bill fails as the tech industry (sans MS) rallies against it.
7) DVDCCA loses both the jurisdiction and on the merits in CA, meanwhile all Federal threats to the DMCA fail, and no major new litigation commenses even though flagrant violations become commonplace.
8) The MS trial concludes by the judge adopting a slightly tougher final judgement than the DOJ version, and both sides declare victory. MS promptly combines innovating new forms of anticompetitive behavior and routine violations of the agreement.
9) US based laws for open source procurement fail, but many succeed in the developing world.
10) Spam increases by 30%. Some lawsuits succeed, others fail. Congress introduces legislation making forged headers illegal.
11) AOL converts its users to the Netscape browser, and web-based XUL applications start to appear. The browser war 2 is declared in the media. Tech users embrace Phoenix as their browser of choice.
12) CD sales revenue will fall by another 10% even though existing P2P networks become unusable. Semi-private, trust based P2P networks become the rage.
I can't wait to see how MS trys to make money selling apache
Probably the same way as Oracle.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
I'm still waiting for my Flying Car from the year 2000..
/.
/. will try its best for some reason.
/. and will continue his career as an editor for a new /. section called "SIR" - Semi-Interesting Read at sir.slashdot.org. Slashdot has successfully debuted such an idea recently with an astounding success!
It's coming.
As far as predictions
1. The technology sector will start recovering in a different form that is divided into smaller parts and tailor to specific needs rather than generalized solutions.
2. Growing dominance and more technological power to big businesses is going to be a dominant theme on
3. Mr. Cringely's column will be cancelled from pbs.org, as it will finally equal to the Book Review section in popularity, even though
4. Mr. Cringely will be hired at
My big bet is that storage is going to be the interesting area in high-tech next year...and I don't just say that because I happen to work in that area. CPUs, video cards, and memory will all get faster in not-very-interesting ways. Wireless networks will grow in not-very-interesting ways (mostly; see below). But there will be heaps of storage-related news:
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
...was about predictions. The rest was about a very disturbing trend in the industry: the death of pure research. Far more worthy of comment that a few lame predictions.
Perhaps among the most interesting, will be the moves Apple makes. Specifically, if they chose to go with IBM's Power4 or stick with Motorola.