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Robert X. Cringely Weighs in on 2006
Simon80 writes "With the beginning of a new year coming another set of 15 predictions from Robert X. Cringely as to how the tech world will shape up in 2006, preceded by a review of how his 2005 predictions turned out. Most of this year's predictions cover well known tech companies, with a few that are about specific technologies like WiMax, media center PCs, and VOIP."
About the only thing worth doing under 'Doze anymore is running certain peripherals, like the printer and scanner, that are fairly low-usage, with crappy FOSS driver support.
More intriguing, though, is exposing more people to the FOSS tradition of helping people without picking their pockets.
Not everyone is going to get all excited: plenty of users prefer the automatic-transmission feel of these commercial GUI offerings, but some will be seduced by the manual transmission sexiness of an operating system that doesn't leave the user stupider at logout than at login.
And, for the truly blessed, there is emacs...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I like most of this guy's article, but some of the things he says are too vague, and anyone with common sense would say the same things. For example:
I was right when I said AMD would give Intel further fits.
Two huge companies in dead competition would give each other fits? Obviously that is bound to happen on some degree over the course of the year. Also, he never really defined "fits", just some kind of conflict that is bound to happen when two major corporations are competing in the same market.
I predicted the RIAA would continue to sue music lovers and they have, despite the fact that it doesn't help anyone and actually hurts everyone to do so.
What would the RIAA do, stop suing? I don't know of any other way to prosecute violators of copyright law besides offing them like the mafia. Again vague and full of common sense.
Cringely (the author) did make some great predictions that came true this year (e.g. PS3, VoIP, TV networks embracing video downloads). I think I might have read his article last year and enjoyed it also. Personally, I would like to see a lower accuracy rate and less vague predictions. However, most people will be fooled like customers to a palm reader
The voice of the next generation. "In this tower, in my mind..." Babble - Tower
"The next big consumer market will be a network computing appliance."
This one has been predicted for a long time. If it hasn't happened yet, what makes Bob think it's going to happen now? I'll stake my personal reputation (note that I'm posting as AC) that he's wrong.
Holy balls, that's interesting speculation.
It's also in my opinion the single most wrong speculation in the entire list. Apple has already demonstrated that they want to keep the system on Apple-only hardware. That's part of the reason for getting TPM chips in the hardware. Ultimately, they'll get hacked, but they'll go after it hard. No matter how much we all say we'd love it if they weren't, Apple is and will always be a hardware company and a company fiercely protective of their intellectual property.
Just look at how they treat rumors sites.
I think he's mostly right, though I can't comment on the financial rumors about TiVO & Google. However, betting on plasma TV Macs, pirated beige box Macs, or the "never gonna happen" pipe dreams of the dot-com era -- streaming video and network appliances -- is just a losing proposition. Until network technology improves significantly, streaming video portables are doomed (especially portables with only 802.11b access), and network appliances will never take off when cell phones, laptops, and desktops can do everything they do better.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You could try, you know, ignoring them.
Agree but this doesn't really count. There has been so much talk of this on the rumor sites that it is just a "gimme."
2) The reason Apple changed its MacWorld announcements at the last minute was because the company sued little Burst.com a few days before, trying to invalidate the Burst patents. But since Apple sued Burst, Burst shares have gone UP by 30 percent. The market is rarely wrong. Suing Burst was an enormous mistake for Apple, casting a pall on their video strategy and potentially costing the company strategic alliances with networks and movie studios. Apple realizes this now and is struggling internally to find a way to change course and put a positive spin on the course correction. Apple will lose and Burst will win, and Apple won't be able to afford to wait for the courts to decide anything, since time is critical in staking out Internet video turf. I predict that Apple will eventually take a license from Burst, that is UNLESS SOME OTHER COMPANY (Google? Real? Yahoo?) doesn't snatch up Burst first. Here's something I've noticed lately: Big companies believe in patents as long as they are talking about THEIR patents. Because Burst is three guys in an office in Santa Rosa, companies like Microsoft and Apple tend not to take them seriously. They forget that Burst spent 21 years and $66 million developing that IP, and the company has code that is still better than anything else on the market -- code not even Microsoft has seen. Unless someone buys the company first, Burst is going to win this and eventually license the world. They are in the right, for one thing, and in practical terms they now have as much money for legal bills as any of their opponents. Apple can't win this one.
Agree. Courts seem to be understanding that more money for more lawyers does not make a large company more right than the little guy. Patent defense by little guys will become a growth industry.
3) But Apple WILL make some inroads against Microsoft. The new Intel Macs will run Windows XP unofficially, and Apple Support acknowledges that they are only days from running XP officially, too. So Apple finally has a solid argument why Windows-centric companies and homes should consider trying a Mac. The best case, though, says that Apple sells an additional million units, which aren't enough for Steve Jobs, so I see him going into a kind of stealth competition with Microsoft. Here's how I believe it will work. Apple won't offer versions of OS X for generic Intel hardware because the drivers and the support obligation would be too huge. But just as you can buy a shrink-wrapped copy of 10.4 for your iMac, they'll gladly sell you a shrink-wrapped Intel version intended for an Intel Mac, but of course YOU CAN PUT IT ON ANY MACHINE YOU LIKE. The key here is to offer no guarantees and only limited support, patterned on the kind you get for most Open Source packages -- a web site, forums, download section. and a wiki. Apple will help users help themselves. With two to three engineers and some outreach to hackers and hardware makers, Apple could put together an unofficial program that could easily attract two to three million Windows users per year to migrate their old machines to the new OS. Imagine the profit margins of three engineers effectively generating $300-plus million per year in sales.
This is a creative idea, but does not smell like a typical Apple/Jobs move. I'll disagree.
4) Enough about Apple. Google will continue to roll out new products and service
Don't read any of these posts and don't make any comments. The Slashdot moderators will notice that these topics are non-starters and they won't accept them. He will fade from Slashdot.
I think that all the Cringely bashers ENJOY ragging on Cringely, so they actually want these posts so they have an excuse to whine. This is very typical Slashdot behavior: it's more about heat than light.
Corrected by inlining a constant: 2006 does have the potential to be a great year for the linux desktop, assuming FALSE.
Corrected even further by logical equivalence: 2006 does not have the potential to be a great year for the linux desktop.
I love Linux, but it's not going on to anyone's desktop any time soon. There are many reasons (No one profits from putting it on the computers sold at computer companies, it's still not ready for a lot of the hardware that's out there, it doesn't always "Just work"). Eventually, it will get to the point where unfortunate things happen rarely, but I am a power user and I still sometimes have to wrestle with it, so I would be reluctant to think of what others might do if they were like my parents.
CHRIST people are babies around here sometimes. +5 Informative my ass.
I think there are two reasons for this, the first is that housing is crashing - so that means that all that money that was going into houses is now looking a lot more seriously at stocks, the second is that the Fed has special team called the PPT - an internal operation designed to buy huge amounts of equities in the event of emergency ( like say the collapse of refco which makes enron look like a saint ). With 270 trillion with a T derivatives on the line, you can better believe that they won't hesitate to buy stocks as needed. Anyhow, be very carefull about stocks, be it housing or PPT, it's a false market and there is a high probability of being shot down no matter how smart you are. My guess is that whatever the market goes up, gold will go up doubble. If you must play the market, try a pool of precious metal mining stocks like PD, NEM, PAAS, SSRI, GG - for higher risk and profit try ones like TRE and RGLD. ( there is also a gold ETF, GLD - but some experts don't trust it) I think most commodities are in for the long term, but in the event of a large economic meltdown all immediate bets other than precious metals are off.
Those countries don't need computers and universities. They need food, stable currencies, no war, a fair legal system, and less state, taxes, regulations, and corruption. Then they'll find out how much education they'll need, and they'll be able to build that education themselves in a way that fits their needs.
Poor and uneducated people need access to information and education before they can realize more effective food production, stable currencies, peace through trade, a fair legal system, and reduced government corruption. Those things are not going to come before education, but rather are a product of education.
"Sorry, but I don't see the point in creating a charity that will give out *computers*."
Fair enough. I'll take a few moments to explain what I'm doing. Perhaps that will help.
I work in a Least Developed Country in the South Pacific. Unemployment is about 70% and the average monthly income runs around USD 50. There are 87 inhabited islands in this country, most of them volcanic and mountainous, spread over about 1000 miles of ocean. As a result of the lack of economic capacity and the incredibly difficult geography, communications are extremely poor.
This lack of communications has a really powerful knock-on effect. Among the most glaring examples is the way members of parliament get elected. They travel over very small areas, saturating the constituents with gifts and promises. Once elected, they remove themselves to the capital, where they're seduced or coerced by the major power blocks and they largely neglect rural development. As a result, we have an unstable, fragmented and corrupt government that is largely ineffective in running, let alone improving, the nation.
So how does a conscientious voter in the village become aware of what's going on, and how do they call their prodigal MP to account? Newspapers can take weeks to reach the outer islands, but more often than not they never do. Radio is unavailable on all but three of the islands, and telephone charges run about USD 0.40 per minute. A single phone call can take up a week's income. When you can find a working telephone, that is.
There are any number of other examples that I could offer, like the need to determine a fair price for produce when it goes onto the ship, the need to stay in touch with family, disaster preparedness, emergency health services etc. etc. Every aspect of the nation's business is hindered by poor communications.
The People First Network is addressing the communication needs of people in the nearby Solomon islands using HF radios connected to refurbished laptop computers. We in Vanuatu are participating in that project and doing a little more. We're designing a 'next-generation' implementation that uses more robust devices, lower-power solutions, and wireless mesh networks to build 'islands' of connectivity. This allows us to reduce the costs per person to a level that's expensive but manageable for the average individual.
Having low-cost laptops available that don't require expensive batteries, that are robust and resistant to shock, heat and humidity would make this task immeasurably easier. The fact that they auto-configure into mesh networks makes them very desirable as well. In one scenario, a person could walk around a circuit of several villages, each hidden from the others by mountains, and each time the person comes into contact with another laptop, they could be configured to automatically exchange email using a UUCP-like approach. It wouldn't be instantaneous, but it would be a darn sight more efficient than anything else that's currently available, and it would work.
Computers have reached a level of capacity where consumer-grade products can actually provide decent basic services to people without any workable alternative. The folks at MIT have grasped this, and decided to go one step further. As someone who's spent the last few years working at cracking exactly the same nut, I welcome and congratulate them. What they want to do is ambitious, but it's acheivable, and when and if it works, it will certainly make life more liveable for people in places like Vanuatu.
P.S. One other objection I frequently see to computers is that people should receive books, which are cheaper and more durable. The answer to that one is that they are neither. They cost huge amounts of money to ship, and paper rots at a tremendous rate in the tropics. Also, there are seldom any decent places to house the books. A really durable laptop can store an entire library inside it, and because it's so small, it's easy to store safely and securely.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.