Eight tech predictions for the next ten years
By Gareth Powell
At this time of the year a forecast is indicated. When I forecast what I think will happen I am often wrong on time scale but I think I do better than most analysts on events.
We are in the middle of a major revolution and it as if everyone is pretending it is not happening. Or trying to disguise the horrid truth by referring to methods which may delay the evil day.
1. In ten years there will no general paid newspapers as we know them now for they are already dying like flies.
That is The Financial Times and The Land in Australia and the Wall Street Journal will exist, probably at inflated prices. But otherwise newspapers will be free or dead. Probably dead. (Incidentally, Rupert Murdoch agrees with me. He just thinks it will take three years longer. But he was ever an optimist.)
In London, where I write this, there are now five giveaway newspapers. And the latest circulation figures show that all but one of the pay-for newspapers has dropped in circulation. Nothing new in that. It was the same at the last circulation sweep.
So the newspapers get desperate and give away DVDs or anything. And middle age people write to tell me newspapers will never die as they still read them.
The middle-aged, sere and wrinkled are not the market. Advertisers want 18-35 year old readers and they are simply disappearing. Stand in front of 450 university students and asked them how many read newspapers. None. None at all.
2. In ten years commercial television as we know it in all major countries will either be very, very sick or dead.
Working it out is very simple. Just check the real figures.
Forget the boasts of the marketing departments which tell you they lead the 8-10 slot. It is all nonsense.
The basic figure is that the number of people who watch free to air commercial television drops steadily every year.
Partly that may be because the content is normally totally woeful. Mainly it is because there are so many better ways of being entertained.
If using a simple electronic set-up at home you can now watch what you like when you like and, if you like, flick past the advertisements, then what in God’s name has commercial television to offer. Very little. Perhaps sport but Rupert Murdoch is buying that up as fast as he can so that you have to pay for it through satellite or cable.
3. In ten years book publishing will have no resemblance to what it is today. And there will be very, very few bookshops.
This is very easy for me to predict because I have seen the train rushing downhill for a very long time. It used to be a standard UK print run for a paperback was 30,000. Now it is about 5,000. Roughly a six times drop. There is a new way of buying books and that is Amazon. It is yet to see its boom years.
The days of the massive best seller that stays on the best selling list of the New York Times for 12 months is well past. Two weeks is now more like it.
Yes, more and more books are being published. But the numbers of copies being printed has dropped like a stone in a muddy pond. The Sony book reader is not quite there yet. But it, or something very like it, will replace most printed books.
I know you think it cannot happen. People thought the long playing record was for ever.
Books will still be published but in very, very limited runs. I now publish books with a print run of ten. I am sure a print run of one is possible.
4. In ten years from today there will be no record shops. None.
What is the point of going to a record shop with a limited stock – no matter how large the store there is a limit to the stock it can hold – and buying a whole album at a daft price when you can download precisely what you want for far, far less. The theory of The Long Tail applies here. There is no record store in the world that can hope to stock the range that is available on the Internet. The biggest record store in New York could not do that. So it closed.
5. In ten years from today there will be no video rental stores. None.
There is simply no logic in going to a store with a limited selection when you can download it through a fairly high speed connection to your home entertainment system. Yesterday I walked into a video store to remember the feel. And it felt just as if it were going to shut down in the near future. Which it will.
6. Sony will never produce a PlayStation IV. PlayStation III was the bridge too far.
To understand the mess that Sony is in you really have to read Shogun by James Clavell, which, as it happens, is a stunning book.
Take Sony as being the whole of Japan as depicted in that book with a lot of daimyos banging away at each other and one person – the Shogun who is currently Howard Stringer – trying to sort the warring sods out. A lot of heads are going to have to lopped and a lot of bellies slit open before Howard Stringer – who is Welsh and not Japanese but no shame in that – gets it right. If he survives, and that is a big if, he has to have the assorted daimyos working together producing salesable, profitable goods.
If Sony lost $200 on every Playstation III it sold – and it did – it will not be keen on the next version. Not even in five years time.
7. Vista is the last operating system that will annoy us from Microsoft.
Microsoft, which has some bright people working there, certainly knows by now that Windows 2000 was enough. Operating systems are no longer the key. Now it is the interface with the Internet that matters. Microsoft has yet to get that right.
The analyst company Gartner says future updates of Vista will be modular and more frequent or, to put it more cruelly, buglets will be removed at an alarming rate.
8. G3 on mobile phones, despite gloomy forecasts (especially by me) will take off like a startled hare.
I have been travelling railways in England and have been totally astounded at the percentage of people watching shows on their mobiles. When the 2008 Olympic Games comes around G3 will have it made.
There are a lot more forecasts that can be made. How YouTube is changing advertising and the film industry; how computers will get cheaper and cheaper while hard disks get bigger and bigger. But you knew all that anyway.
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