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Cringely's 2006 Results, 2007 Predictions
Underpants writes "Bob Cringely posts the results of his 2006 predictions (only 69% successful, so Bob is sad). He also lists his calls for 2007; none are particularly shocking, but some are at least interesting. 2007 predictions from the article: '4) No one DRM technology emerges as the winner and the RIAA begins to back off as it loses a few legal cases. Still, no Internet-only song wins a Grammy or is even recognized as existing. 9) Zune 2.0 appears, isn't brown, but still nobody buys it. 10) The year the net crashed (in the USA). Video overwhelms the net and we all learn that the broadband ISPs have been selling us something they can't really deliver.'"
This guy should run a stock tip sheet.
Insert witty sig here.
Will Vista be the Zune of operating systems?
...going through their predictions list for once. Also, he played the umpire quite well - that's some pretty harsh judgements. (Wrong on iPhone/iTV - heh.)
In Italy this is already happening, with the main ISP (Telecom Italia) faking DNS problems to cover up the fact that they just can't deliver all the ADSL they sold. Despite the fact that they shape Bittorrent (and other P2P) traffic...
No DRM emerges as a winner? of course not, nobody wins with DRM, not even the record companies or the artists, as consumers hate it and it drives sales away...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Number 2 seems like he got it right but is saying it's wrong for some reason, I don't quite get #5 at all - haven't read anything to this effect but I'm probably wrong.
2007 prediction - "Still, no Internet-only song wins a Grammy or is even recognized as existing."
This already happened in the UK in 2006. Crazy by Gnarls Barkely went to number 1 on the charts without having a single physical copy on sale. It is one of the best songs of 2006. It stayed at nubmer one for nine weeks.
Did this happen? Intel changes their campaign up every year,
and they now use "Leap Ahead"...but there's been no
real rebranding as far as i can tell.
I predict Cringley is going to get even more annoying and
no one will even notice.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
From the article:
That is my worst performance EVER. I got nine of 15 predictions correct for a 60 percent average. In my defense I'll point out that just because I am wrong now doesn't mean I'll still be wrong in another week. Three years ago I predicted Intel would support AMD's 64-bit instruction extensions, but they took 53 weeks to do so, making me off by seven days. I think that by the end of February, 2-3 of these predictions could still swing the other direction.
Editors: Please RTFA? Thanks.
"Microsoft is discussing internally how to help Sony from going under, since that would create a raft of antitrust problems for Redmond. I am not making this up."
Microsoft supporting another company (Apple)? What an unexpected event.
Really, if this is a prediction, fire Nostradomus.
4) No one DRM technology emerges as the winner and the RIAA begins to back off as it loses a few legal cases. Still, no Internet-only song wins a Grammy or is even recognized as existing.
Why don't they (the RIAA) just lossy-encode and decode all songs before releasing them on CD? For example, wav to mp3 and then mp3 back to wav, pressing the resulting wav on the retail audio-CD. Nobody would be able to encode the original CDs to lossy formats and get acceptable results anymore.
Again, from the article:
6) Sony solves Blu-ray laser diode problem just in time for IBM to suffer production difficulties with the Cell processor. More bad news for Sony.
7) The Sony news is SO bad that it deserves two predictions. I would predict the fall of CEO Howard Stringer again if there were clearly somebody at Sony who wants his job. The business is in such difficulty that Microsoft is discussing internally how to help Sony from going under, since that would create a raft of antitrust problems for Redmond. I am not making this up.
This guy's being impossible. Those predictions are as solid as his PhD degree. Maybe if he added a question mark to each of his predictions, he can get away with them more easily.
If a group of people got together and thought it out right, this could be a huge opportunity to fund your retirements or your next real business. The trick being part of the people actually in the potential future IPO and the rest supplying it with space, furniture, office supplies, computers, hosting, etc (use your imagination). As long as you don't do anything illegal and invest the excessive wages etc you can come out way ahead on this. Look at YouTube.com and you will know the dotcom era isn't completely dead. Make the principles of supply and demand work for you.
They did rebrand.
... New Logo.
Old Logo and now
Did someone actually care? nope.
solid predictions?
6) isn't a no-brainer. After all, Sony needs to be in a situation where its current supply of PS3s is insufficient for demand. That may not happen, in which case IBM's current rate of Cell production is just fine.
7) is not a prediction. It's a "contrary-to-fact" statement ("I would, if there were" -- but there aren't so he doesn't) and a present-tensed declaration: "business is, Microsoft is... I am not making this up".
So, no, he ain't making solid predictions, so we can go back to reading Dvorak with confidence.
And his Ph.D.? Has anyone actually read his thesis?
:(){
14) Remember outsourcing and offshoring? That tide turns for a bunch of reasons but mainly because a new class of CEOs will say the old class of CEOs was filled with idiots. it only takes a fifteen year old to realize that if there aren't any worthwhile jobs in a country, the population won't be able to buy any of the shiny goods produced, cheaply made in countries with poor labor standards or not. One can only hope that this new class of CEOs will kill their masters and usurp the throne quickly. Again, I can only hope this prediction comes true, but then again, if i can buy my DVD player for $.65 at wal-mart, it doesn't matter if i have a real job, or any hope of having a real job. Oh well, i guess we can let "the invisible hand" decide. Kudos to domestic employment--it's more expensive, but it's worth it.
I've got two women, you can't tell them apart, one lives in my bosom, and the other one lives in my heart. The one in my
"You must be new here."
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
Just read here:
p rediction_bob_20060104_000992.html
0 60518_000897.html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/predictions/bob/2006/
However, Cringley goes into more overall depth in a previous article.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20
MANY IBM employees DO feel this way, btw. IBM appears to be spending little in the way of future product development (including feature enhancements to current products), other than just outright buying companies and incorporating their products. Stock performance has been mediocre for years.
Sooner or later, that kind of internal attitude starts showing up to your customers.
I'm the submitter, and that figure was my typo: if you look down towards your fingers, you'll see that the '9' is right next to the '0'. I mean look down onto the keyboard... ;)
If Cringely is sad, then that's a good reason for the rest of us to be happy.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I sure do... I found it on youtube and it is quite good.
We were supposed to have FTTH (fiber to the home) 20 years ago.
We've been paying surcharges to get FTTH for 20 years.
To date the Telcos and cablecos have delivered 0 inches of FTTH. Not an inch of fiber has been laid.
And now America is quantitatively and qualitatively behind, in an area where we were the leaders, only to get surpassed by anybody who's actually laid in some FTTH.
The difference of having bandwidth as opposed to starving for it is, well just imagine yourself back before the internet. Imagine yourself having to use carbon paper. Life was a lot slower then.
Now with uTube and MoviesOnDemand, VideosOnDemand and the thirst for all kinds of streaming media, the demand for band is going to collapse the copper infrastructure. It wont melt the wire down as much as it will vaporize it in a coronal flare.
If you work in management for a telco or a cableco, look for Federal indictments to come to your office before the decade is out.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Ah yes, once again someone predicts that the Internet (or major portion thereof) will "collapse" at a certain point! Which would be frightening, except that such predictions have been made on a regular basis for quite some time.
Robert Metcalfe used to regularly predict this, each time moving the target date when it didn't happen on schedule. It appears that Cringely has decided to pick up the ball and keep it going. If I'm counting correctly, the Internet was supposed to have collapsed under the weight of traffic about a dozen times so far. It hasn't yet, but let's not let past performance stop future predictions!
1) I predicted that Apple would announce iPhone and iTV products as well as content deals. The content deals happened and some of the iTV technology was demonstrated, but I think we'll have to wait another week or so for the rest, so I guess I was wrong.
Yeah, wrong. Not to mention that I wrote something about Apple moving in this direction a year and a half ago. This is no "prediction" its writing on the wall.
2) I said OS X would run on generic Intel hardware, though Apple wouldn't support it. This is true in the sense that people have made OS X run on generic Intel hardware, but APPLE hasn't, so the item is wrong.
There are a number of technical reasons that this will likely not happen. Yes, wrong.
3) More products, services, and a stock split for Google. I was right about the first bits but that's like predicting sunset will come. The split didn't happen because I never realized how much cash Google was going to generate -- far more than they can even spend. So the item is wrong.
Yeah, wrong
4) More bad news for Sun. That's true.
I might say that sun really has remained the same. If you use stock price as an indicator of "bad" then they are neither good nor bad. I might disagree with this assesment. Wrong.
5) IBM customers revolt. It is happening slower than makes sense, but yes, they are revolting. True.
Ok, whatever.
6) More Vista delay. I'm going to claim this one because the Vista that's just appearing was delayed twice in 2006 alone and is a shadow of what it was intended to be. True.
Yeah, no. You were wrong. Vista shipped in 06, I've seen the cd's myself.
7) PS3 is in trouble as is Howard Stringer. This is all true. The PS3 was late to market, the blue laser diode shortage has hurt the company, developers aren't amused, and the word inside Sony is that Sir Howard is toast. True.
Right.
8) WiMax will suffer under Sprint Nextel. My feeling here was that merging the two cell companies would be too distracting for them to do very much with their top asset (in my view) -- all those WiMax licenses. Since they didn't roll out much of anything in 2006, I'd say this one is true.
Not sprints fault. The standard hasn't really been ratified. There are only a few makers of the silicon necessary to drive the antennas. This has nothing to do with sprint and everything to do with the hardware. I'd say this is wrong.
9) Media Center PCs still won't take off as they try to compete with cheaper embedded devices. True.
Yeah, about right.
10) TiVo will be bought. Obviously wrong, though I still don't see the company surviving as an independent. Wrong.
No purchase, wrong.
11) Intel will rebrand itself and nobody will notice. Intel did, we didn't -- true.
Intel did not rebrand. They launched two new TV ads a few product logos - but they have the same "feel" of the last 15 years of advertising. I wouldn't really call that a "rebranding" effort. So, wrong.
12) No desktop OS or PC from Google. People (not me) were absolutely convinced this time last year that Google was going head-to- head against Windows. Nope. It didn't happen, and won't. I was correct.
Ok, right.
13) Skype won't make much, if any, money for eBay in 2006 (or 2007). Skype got a lot of press and moved a long way toward building a better service that makes more business sense, but the company is still at least a year away from making money. True.
Ok. Right
14) Yahoo will surprise us. Wrong. Yahoo is in a crisis from which the company may not recover with current management. Sigh.
Ok. Right.
15) Apple will license technology from Burst. They should have by now but the companies are still fighting in court. For those following the fight, a hearing on February 8th will lead to a decision less than a month later that will tightly define this patent battle in a way that will make one
Actually, according to TFA it's only 60% (9 out of 15 correct), though he claims that three of the others may also come good in the immediate future.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Concerning Vista: He acknowledged that Vista shipped in 2006 but gave himself credit because it was delayed TWICE during 2006. AND it wasn't released to retail until a few days ago (or is that a few days from now, well, who cares, no one's buying it anyway). Originally it was supposed to be released in like March and then, I think, August. Besides, according to Microsoft, the Official release is January 2007. Those CDs you saw were advance OEM copies.
Concerning WiMax and Sprint: Just because it's not Sprint's fault doesn't mean he was wrong in his prediction.
I'd defend his Sun thing, but from what I've seen Sun is doing just fine. Not spectacular, but not horrible either.
I'd give him 8/15 or 53.33%
Nerd TV
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
C'mon Cringely. Google won't split.
4) No one DRM technology emerges as the winner and the RIAA begins to back off as it loses a few legal cases. Still, no Internet-only song wins a Grammy or is even recognized as existing.
Recently, Madlib and Talib Kweli released an internet-only album titled The Liberation. For fans of undergound hip-hop this is big, two icons who are the most talented artists out right now collaborating to put out a 100% free album that many are flocking to download.
Granted, this music is underground for a reason - it's conscious and isn't made for the clubs - but it is a big step. Especially considering Talib Kweli's label falls under major label distribution.
The year the net crashed (in the USA).
I don't think that the net is going to crash. Or even slow down for everyone. I do think, however, that cable ISPs might have big problems administering networks. The local cable ISP where I live sends me flyers in the mail every week, at least, explaining how I can get my entire home entertainment needs packaged up. They seem to be doing a gigantic sale to a wide market, and I have for a long time suspected that they are not putting as much work into the technical side of running an ISP (and a massive one), as convincing people that they can get teh television and teh pr0n and teh cellphonez with ringtonez cheaply. This might be just a prejudice of mine, but I think a lot of these "entertainment ISPs" and their customers are going to realize that its not as easy as the smiling glossy people in the ads have it.
But I don't think it will crash the net. I think a few markets will have slow down, a few class action lawsuits, people realizing that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and then their will be some reinvestment in infrastructure and everything will be back to normal fairly quickly.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
FTA: "5) IBM customers revolt. It is happening slower than makes sense, but yes, they are revolting. True."
I agree. IBM customers ARE revolting!"If your parents never had children, chances are you wonât either." -Dick Cavett
Not only their logo, but they ditched Pentium for the Core in January.
Intel did not rebrand. They launched two new TV ads a few product logos - but they have the same "feel" of the last 15 years of advertising. I wouldn't really call that a "rebranding" effort. So, wrong.
I think you failed to notice this...
Okay, some people are making fun of Cringely's predictions.
Fine, but they should put their money where their mouth is: let's see their alternative predictions and let Slashdot revisit the issue next year.
Maybe there are better players out there, there is no reason for them to hide.
We could even have a Slashdot prediction, maybe based on votes from Slashdot users.
There are so many possibilities - to put your money where your mouth is.
If something could have killed the Net, it's P2P. Yet, it is still humming along just fine. A single dedicated file sharer can easily consume the equivalent in bandwidth of an entire neighborhood worth of crappy pixelated YouTube video viewing, and there are many dedicated file sharer already. My guess is that Akamai and Google's servers are going to melt before the Net come to its knees.
However, between the need for lower latency due to VoIP deployment and the constant massive increase in traffic from domestic Net users, it's another good year to be a network engineer.
:wq
3) More products, services, and a stock split for Google. I was right about the first bits but that's like predicting sunset will come. The split didn't happen because I never realized how much cash Google was going to generate -- far more than they can even spend. So the item is wrong.
What does how much cash a company generates have to do with a stock split? Nothing (well, generating lots of cash makes a split slightly more, rather than less, likely.)
Does he think that a stock split somehow raises capital? He should stick to technology and avoid finance.
The fact that there are quite a few posts saying Cringely got that one wrong makes it look like he was in fact right. They dropped the Pentium brand name as their primary line, a name that they had been using for ~13 years. How many times have you looked at a software box and seen "Pentium Required/Recommended" over those last 13 years? The reason no one noticed is because it isn't as big a deal. Yes the Core 1/2 chips offer better power, performance and aren't as hot, but the average computer buyer doesn't look at hardware like that. They look at what software will work on it, Windows? Check. Office? Check. An Intel or AMD sticker only matters to zealots anymore.
No sig for you!!
The compilers exist, in the sense that outfits like PathScale and PGI already have compilers that support OpenMP and some degree of automatic parallelization. They need a lot of work to scale to larger numbers of cores but the primary roadblock here is integration with IDEs and moving these technologies into mainstream computing. If these companies and Microsoft figure out how to make these compilers pervasive with Visual C++, etc. things will change quite dramatically. I don't think this will happen in 2007, though. What will happen is that compiler vendors make significant strides improving access to parallel programming models, pareticualrly with support for Co-Array Fortran and UPC.
We could argue about vista lol, honestly though, it was announced in like february that it would be delayed, so that wouldn't be very hard to predict.
:)
With sprint he says: "WiMax will suffer under Sprint Nextel. My feeling here was that merging the two cell companies would be too distracting for them to do very much with their top asset (in my view) -- all those WiMax licenses. "
Sprint can't in good concience ship cards to consumers let alone do a wide spread deployment of hardware knowing that the silicon is largely untested. It would do wimax a disservice to deploy it before it is ready, and have people pay for it.
Yeah sun seems OK to me poor guys, lol.
so how about 7/15
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
That's not a new logo/ pentium-basic-en.jpg
http://enithost.com/views/images/es/detalles-serv
'intel' in a ring has been around for ages.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I'm pretty sure the company who sold that DRM technology to Sony came out with a nice payday from the deal.
You just proved his point about no one noticing. They don't use the "Pentium" brand anymore. The latest generation desktop processors are referred to as "The Intel® Core(TM) processor family".
See?
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Of course WiMAX (8026.16e) hardware is not really available yet, but it is too early still. There was a plugfest in 9/2006: http://www.wimaxforum.org/news/downloads/Mobile_Wi MAX_Plugfest_WhitePaper.pdf
Sprint announced they would have trial markets in 2007 and deployments in 2008. Not 2006: http://www2.sprint.com/mr/news_dtl.do?id=12960
Not really, because their DRM scheme either becomes a publicity nightmare (like Sony's rootkit) or it gets cracked very shortly after it's released and all those months (or years) of research and development are for naught, forcing them to start over again from scratch.
Please point me at a crack for the iTunes 5 AES version of FairPlay. Really, I want to start buying from iTMS again.
The python debugger script for Windows only gets half credit, since it's not a crack but a workaround.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
As someone who has worked in Telecom for Cisco Systems I know that the
n etworking
.....
number one road block is poor infrastruture, and 90%+ of all fiber in
the ground in most areas is dark fiber.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fiber
The capacity is more than there, and eurpoe and japan already have
bi-directional 100Mb connections, and here is the REAL kicker.
The US tax payer already paid to upgrade the internet to the tune of $200 billion,
and it was SQUANDERED !
http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
http://www.muniwireless.com/community/1023
My uncle worked for Southwestern Bell for over 20 yrs, they are greed driven
cold hearted bastards of the worst kind.
We are 16th in the world in broadband and falling rapidly, 3rd world countries
are even passing us up, its fricking pathetic and SOLELY due to corporate greed and fear.
They KNOW that if broadband is cheap and ubiquitous it is the end of
their long distance phone call money train due to VoIP, and piracy will
skyrocket in terms of video, audio, and other.
So when the Telcos bemoan how it can't be done, they know they can DWDN multiple
SONET lines down fiber, and hit 200+ channels of SONET DWDM, but they won't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWDM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_
NONE of this is very new, its been around for a fairly long while,
in fact.... SONET FAQ...Last updated January 24, 1998
So again, when they decry it can't be done, do not hesitate to SCREAM "BULLSHIT"
at the top of your lungs.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
"AMD and Intel continue to beat the crap out of each other with customers gaining but wondering why there is no software that supports those new 8-way processors, as both compilers and third-party developers fail to keep up." Linux... VMWare... hello??
-
Vista will receive a cold welcome from the
user market, due to intrusive DRM
-
half of my 2007 preditions will be wrong
Hey, I think I will get at least 50% predictions correct!I predict slashdot will collapse under the weight of the trolls.
Note to stupid moderators: moderate as a troll.
Agreed, corporations would be foolish to install Vista in 2007. Windows XP was not heartache-free until SP2 had been released.
LOL. Another way of describing Vista besides "the Zune of operating systems": "dog's breakfast".
You were too optimistic on evaluating the correctness of at least your predictions #1 and #2. Regarding #6, Vista has only been launched for corporate users yet...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F