Dusting off the Crystal Balls

[Kevin Chilton]

It’s that time of year again; the season for scrying the murky mesh of probabilities that will help determine our future. And of course we techies are renowned for our unerring ability to completely miss the target, as the following examples show:

1. “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” — A memo at Western Union, 1878 (or 1876).
2. “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?” — Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter’s call for investment in the radio in 1921.
3. "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." — IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943
4. “Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.” — Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948.
5. "Future computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." — Popular Mechanics magazine, 1949.
6. “There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.” — T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, in 1961 (the first commercial communications satellite went into service in 1965).
7. "There's no reason anyone will want a computer at home." — Ken Olson chairman of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
8. "640K ought to be enough for anybody." — Bill Gates, 1981."

Still, being wrong usually doesn’t stop us from making fools of ourselves again, so this year I’m not even going to try. Instead, I will take a look at three of the industry professionals’ major predictions.

The first major prediction (and a fairly safe bet) from both the TechRepublic and Gartner is the continuing explosion in mobile communications technologies. The TechRepublic focuses on the Web development aspects, citing the W3C Mobile Web Initiative as a “good place to keep up with technologies and standards for mobile Web development”, while Gartner predicts that by 2012 mobile workers will abandon their notebooks, despite their slowly diminishing size, for smaller, more portable mobile devices. Gartner describes these devices as "new classes of Internet-centric pocket-able devices at the sub-$400 level." PC world are much braver in their article The Next 25 Years in Tech, where they claim “ In years to come you’ll enjoy ubiquitous Internet access….delivered to your ‘desktop’ from a portable device..”, “you may carry your pocket-size computer with you and beam the image to a nanocomputer embedded in the nearest wall-size screen.” and ..”Body computers will progress from monitoring health to delivering medical care and ultimately to augmenting reality by piping the Internet directly into the brain.”

Another safe prediction espoused by many pundits, including Gartner and the Economist, is the coming of age of the Open Source movement. In its article the Economist tells us “Rejoice: the embrace of “openness” by firms that have grown fat on closed, proprietary technology is something we’ll see more of in 2008”. It goes on to explain how the trend toward openness has been given added impetus by the recent legal battles against SCO and Apple and how “because it is free, Linux become the operating system of choice for low-end PCs”. Gartner also predicts, “the year 2012 will also mark a time when 80% of all commercial software will include open source elements”.

The third and final, safe prediction is that everything Web 2.0 will start to become more prevalent in the enterprise. Thus, according to IDC, the explosion in mashups, Web applications and social networks will “drive new software to streamline information that will benefit both consumer and enterprise spaces — and expects sites like Facebook and Orkut to collaborate with IBM, Microsoft and other enterprise players in promoting Web 2.0 information creation and sharing environments”. The newest Web 2.0 wave is the increasing availability of Web Office applications whose widespread adoption, according to Josh Catone, Lead Writer on the ReadWriteWeb, will be when Microsoft offer a fully online office suite and the ability of these of Web Office applications to offer an Offline mode (e.g., Gears, AIR, Silverlight etc.,).

So there you have them; three fairly safe bets that should not show up in any future “cracked crystal ball” lists. Now I know I said I would not be making any of my own techie predictions but I will make two general ones which I consider valid for the next 10 to 20 years:

The weather is only going to get worse.

If you want a job in the near future, learn Chinese.

[Kevin Chilton]

For those who want to learn Chinese:
Mando Madarin - Live 1-on-1 online lessons:
http://www.mandomandarin.com/

For those who want to build an Ark:
FACTS ON NOAH'S ARK
http://www.ldolphin.org/cisflood.html

[hugh]

Weather will up and down like a w**'s K**' as it always has ('same as it ever was - Talking Heads, 80s)'. I'mm for cutting the crap of pollution, but secretly was mighty impressed by Joel Kaufmann and the rest of the gang yeah yeah yeah yeah - i.e. Svensmark et al. : icebergs been shring since 1700 - before ind. revol. : Satellite data show no temp rise in 1990s. temps fell from 1945 to to 1970. Glob.warm.mafia uses temps from hot cities to give false impression. Could go on and on

[artfree4rhymes]

I can predict tree things what will hapens in nearest future;software and hardware will be expanding faster and faster (sorry kev i realy dont like that),weather will only going to get worse (you dont need to be genius to predict that) 4 what i can find easy solutions like planted grass on all roofs (maybe tax credit 4 those what will do that?) ând third thing what im sure tomorow i gonna do around200covers at diner time(small kithen5chefs)and im sure thats gona be fun..good luck with all predictions

[hugh]

Out TV mag did its bit of predicting inventions that would be made in the next 20 years (one 'scientist' wuz quoted as saying 'yes, there still can be surprises, but we now know enough to predict the surprises'. Of course the aticle just usual crap about Nuke fusion being energy of the future - boy is STEORN or heres another ...
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/300042#t
gonna hit em like a ton o' bricks.

The staid space predictions will seem like old hat as well when Tajmar's anti-grav gets off th ground.

[Stefan Ebbinghaus]

You started learning chinese?