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Bob Cringely's Predictions For 2005
An anonymous reader writes "Bob Cringley publishes his predictions for developments in the world of IT every year. His latest column contains his predictions for 2005 and a brief look back at his predictions for 2004."
I wonder why guys like Cringley never put their predictions up on Idea Futures Exchange? Maybe its because their predictions aren't that surprising?
Seastead this.
If the beta release is any indication, it sure looks like MS has a homerun on their hands with the Giant Antispyware application. Everyone I have spoken with has had new, undiscovered apps discovered running on their machine after installing and running the beta.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
4) The Recording Industries Association of America will continue to sue customers while their business slowly dissolves. The big threat here isn't file swapping, but affiliate programs like Apple's iTunes Affiliate Program that I am sure will be shortly copied by all the online music stores. These affiliate programs turn bloggers into shills and blogs into record stores, with the result that record company's last source of power -- marketing clout -- is taken away. This will take time, but it is the beginning of the end for old-style record companies.
I didn't realize iTunes had an affiliate program, but it seems like a logical step. Amazon's been doing this for a long time with music CDs, of course, as have other vendors. While viral marketing is definitely a good way to promote things, I don't see it reducing the record companies' marketing clout. I've posted before about how they used viral marketing to promote Christina Aguilera when she was new. This is just another marketing avenue for them. But really, you still need to reach people who don't read blogs. People still watch TV. Still listen to the radio. Still read magazines and newspapers.
EricWhy is William Shatner's face on my All-Bran?
Expect some big hobbling of VOIP, at least for John. Q. Public.
and how many MS beta releases have not had feature removals and other de-improvements before final release?
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1743742,00.as p
The Giant spyware application nukes stuff the other vendors decided was benign. For example, there are a bunch of tool-bar and assistants that are on their own safe, but can and will install other applications if not instructed otherwise by the user. AdAware won't nuke those; It nukes the spyware they can install, however.
This is where the majority of the "Wow, I found spyware!" factor comes from.
It also makes a bigger deal out of wiping files after the spyware has been nuked. AdAware and SpyBot leave the odd DLL, the odd this, the odd that lying about from time to time. The spyware is gone (It neither runs nor is capable of running) but Giant will claim this as an infection and bitch at the user that they have SPYWARE, when in fact they have an unusable dll stub in their windows directory.
.sig: Now legally binding!
- Linux on the Desktop
Been predicted over and over again, but "major inroads"? Linux will grow gradually, but I can't see how he missed a glaring hole: Linux wireless support. My prediction for 2005 would have been wireless drivers for Linux that work just as easily as the built in networking drivers we have now. THEN you can start talking about major inroads, especially on laptops (which I think Linux is more suitable for than the Desktop).
Just my 2 cents.
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
Wait a second, just hold everything... Microsoft release buggy, flawed software in a hurry to get the first to market advantage, and then the unscrupulous use those flaws to hijack the computers of hundreds of thousands world wide... then Microsoft PURCHASES THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE to apply band aids to their seeping wounds?
Maybe I'm going mad here, but since they wrote the damned OS in the first place, wouldn't they know best where to apply system patches etc., and wouldn't it be better and faster to get the people that originally developed the OS to fix it up?
But why would they when they can actually charge people for their patches now? Sure its free for now, but not for long, as the EULA states. Not to mention their OS authentication services (which you can turn off, if you buy that line), which their patches ostensibly never mentioned.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I know when someone is trying to pass off horse manure as honey...
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Appearantly you've not tried it yourself. There are no MS apps that come with it. While I understand what you are saying about some security issues relating to root access, I have installed Linspire 4.5, on multiple machines and found it to be easy to install, easy to add/remove applications to and found it to be quite serviceable. You can easily add users so as to avoid running as root.
I've really got to give Michael Roberts a lot of credit for his attempt to get the average user away from the grips of Microsoft, spam, viruses and malware. When my son's P4 HP Pavilion ground to a halt with malware, I loaned him an old PII-266 running Linspire 4.5 while I roto-rootered his Windows machine. He and his wife were able to start using it for surfing and e-mail with about 2 minutes training. It worked just fine with winmodem for dialup access, too. Now I'm having trouble getting it back from him.
I'm currently running SuSE 9.2 myself and have experience with RedHat, Fedora, Mandrake, Knoppix and Xandros as well as Linspire. No Linspire doesn't have as much geek appeal, but it's a reasonably good product IMHO. Oh, and no, I have no affiliation with Linspire in any way other than as someone who's tried it.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
We might see that as early as next week with the rumored introduction of an el-cheapo Mac without a display. The price for that box is supposed to be $499, which would give customers a box with processor, disk, memory, and OS into which you plug your current display, keyboard, and mouse. Given that this sounds a lot like AMD's new Personal Internet Communicator, which will sell for $185, there is probably plenty of profit left for Apple in a $499 price. But what if they priced it at $399 or even $349? Now make it $249, where I calculate they'd be losing $100 per unit. At $100 per unit, how many little Macs could they sell if Jobs is willing to spend $1 billion? TEN MILLION and Apple suddenly becomes the world's number one PC company. Think of it as a non-mobile iPod with computing capability. Think of the music sales it could spawn. Think of the iPod sales it would hurt (zero, because of the lack of mobility). Think of the more expensive Mac sales it would hurt (zero, because a Mac loyalist would only be interested in using this box as an EXTRA computer they would otherwise not have bought). Think of the extra application sales it would generate and especially the OS upgrade sales, which alone could pay back that $100. Think of the impact it would have on Windows sales (minus 10 million units). And if it doesn't work, Steve will still have $5 billion in cash with no measurable negative impact on the company. I think he'll do it.
I found this prediction to be the most interesting, and maybe the closest to going out on a limb that Cringely gets. It also sounds like wishful thinking, like Cringely is trying to talk Jobs into it by convincing him this would be a smart move.
I can't see that Jobs would be willing to lose money on this venture, even if it is a smart move. It's more likely that maybe it would start out at $499 and then slowly drop in price over time.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
"Someone so inclined, and with the source, go out and jam police and fire communication systems."
There are a lot easier ways of doing this than hacking WiFi cards, such as buying $20 worth of parts from Radio Shack.
Transmitting on a certain frequency isn't as easy as sending a command to the hardware "transmit these bits on frequency X". The hardware only has a limited range of frequencies it can transmit on, and the antenna has to be matched to the frequency as well. Police, fire, etc use VHF (150MHz-ish), UHF (400MHz-ish), and 800MHz bands. Getting a 2.4GHz radio down to those frequencies may be possible but it would be a whole lot more work than building a radio from scratch. And at 200mW of transmit power, you're going to cause interference for what, a whole block and a half? I think not.
The reason hardware vendors don't want to release the source code is they (rightly or wrongly) think that with the source code, their chip can be reverse engineered and some fly-by-night company is going to copycat their product and cause them to lose sales. Same reason Nvidia and ATI only release binary drivers for their video cards.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
It lies. It found 10 "problems" on my machine. 3 were merely programs that have optional spyware in the installer (which I declined and wasn't installed), and the other 7 were rated "high risk" and "critical" (nasty things like CoolWebSearch) but they were actually just a few harmless leftover registry entries from when AdAware and Spybot had previously cleaned my machine. It looked very nice and the warnings sounded very serious but I did not get any actual benefit from running the program, because it did not remove any actual spyware that was missed by AdAware or Spybot. I imagine the situation is much the same with the people you've talked with.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Just because you want it to happen doesn't mean it's going to happen. Bob Cringely seems to quite often second guess major industry players and try to predict what they're going to do, but let me just ask you this one question:
Has Apple ever sold a computer and taken a loss on it?
Also, if Apple were to sell 10 million of these things, that's a $1 billion loss, but what if people love the cheap price and they "accidentally" sell 50 million of them? That's a $5 billion loss and now he's almost bankrupted the company. Of course, they could make it up on iPod sales, but they can't run the company on only iPod sales profits.
Good article, BTW.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon