Place your bets on the future of IT
By Gareth Powell
Two quite amusing rather than amazing lists. The first is from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster who has set up a betting list for the Macworld next week. He has given odds on all of the rumors. Neat.
Almost Certain (in the next 2-6 months):
1. iPhone entering production phase of 12m units (Certainty rank: 9 out of 10)
2. iTV ($299) release at Macworld with some improvements from September debut (10 out of 10)
Likely (in the next 6-12 months):
3. iPhone with candy-bar form factor (9 out of 10)
4. Widescreen iPod with touch-sensitivity and wireless features (7 out of 10)
5. Second smartphone iPhone model with integrated keyboard (7 out of 10)
6. iSight camera, 4GB or 8GB storage on the iPhone (7 out of 10)
7. Multiple carriers as iPhone providers (vs. Cingular only or MVNO (6 out of 10)
A Stretch (possibly in the next 12-18 months):
8. Ultra-portable 12″ MacBook Pro (4 out of 10)
9. Radio-transparent material used for iPhone casing (3 out of 10)
10. iPhone to feature ‘iChat Mobile’ video and instant messaging (2 out of 10)
11. OSX 10.5 Leopard release at Macworld (3 out of 10)
Source: Silicon Valley
The second is from Robert Cringely who is a noted seer and pundit and is pretty good at making forecasts although, as I do, he often gets the dates wrong. What follows is just a selected few of his guesses. Go to his site for the full list. The bits in italics after each prediction are my comment.
Apple releases iTV, a bunch of flat-panel MacTV’s that contain Mac Minis, etc. This is broken record and exactly what I predicted last year, but I still mean it.
Doubt it.
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.
He is wrong here unless he thinks the world ends at Florida. In England this week an Internet-only song is top of the pops.
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.
Who could argue? But this does not make the new 8-way processors a bad idea. It is just a question of time before everyone gets up to speed.
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.
Probably right. Sony IS in a sea of trouble and there is no debate that Howard Stringer is a beleagured Shogun. But, unlike Cringely, I think it will come good this year.
Windows Vista SP1 ships in June despite the fact that Vista structurally shouldn’t require service packs. Except it will.
Absolutely.
Zune 2.0 appears, isn’t brown, but still nobody buys it.
Did you know there was no word in Welsh for the color brown? Which may account for the lack of success of the Zune. The Druids are against it.
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.
Beyond debate. But the speed of recovery in Asia from a catastrophic crash (still being sorted but working in a sense in less than a week) suggests everyone will learn from it.
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.
Seems fair.
Source: Cringely
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