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

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.

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 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