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."

Comments

Perfect for Idea Futures Exchange

[Baldrson]

I wonder why guys like Cringley never put their predictions up on Idea Futures Exchange? Maybe its because their predictions aren't that surprising?

Affiliate programs

[Eric Giguere]

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.

Eric
Why is William Shatner's face on my All-Bran?

VOIP:

[Pig Hogger]

6) VoIP will continue to shatter the telephone industry with the arrival of WiFi phones, which might finally be the killer app for hotspots. Eventually, all the backbone suppliers will figure out that VoIP is their salvation and will either start their own VoIP companies or ally with big VoIP players.

Won't happen. Local telephone providers, being required by law to provide universal service, will convince authorities that they need the phone revenue VOIP is cutting-off from them.

Expect some big hobbling of VOIP, at least for John. Q. Public.

Re:Microsoft Antispyware prediction is off the mar

[Bill Currie]

and how many MS beta releases have not had feature removals and other de-improvements before final release?

Re:Microsoft Antispyware prediction is off the mar

[technos]

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.

This one too:

[mtrisk]

- 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.

What?

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

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 MS apps?

[the_rajah]

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

Re:Different issue

[tylernt]

"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.