Intel is playing chess, AMD is playing draughts - Financial analyst quoted in WSJ
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Technology predictions are a waste of time
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL has just woken up to the fact that trying to make predictions in the information technology industry is a complete waste of time.
Therefore it has published a list of the top ten worst technology predictions of all time.
Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943 that there was a world market for maybe five computers.
IBM also told Xerox that there was a worldwide market for only 5,000 photocopiers.
Darryl Zanuck, head of the movie studio 20th Century Fox, in 1946 thought it unlikely that TV would work because "people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
But it is easy for predictions to go pear shaped or at least for the timing to be out of whack. So we have been shuffling our tarot cards and come up with a list of predictions that we think might happen. They might not happen this year, or even next, but since all stories become true eventually we have avoided putting any dates on them.
1. Apple will release a tablet, it will be expensive and praised to the skies until people realise that it is just a giant Ipod Touch, but it will still sell well.
2. Even though it has a device waiting in the wings, Microsoft will release its Windows 7 tablet three to nine months after Apple, and it will be half the price but fail to sell at all.
3. Steve Ballmer will leave Microsoft to join a monastery, or at least a country club, devoted to quiet calm.
4. Windows 7 will over take from Windows XP as the dominant operating system but no one will notice because the press will be talking about the next version of MacOS.
5. Google will still be the king of search but will not dominate in other areas.
6. Microsoft will still be the king of operating systems, but will fail to win the lead in search.
7. As a joke Mozilla will release a version of Firefox with an IE interface and no one will be able to tell the difference.
8. Intel will release a family of chips that use less electricity and have more cores but no one will be able to tell if they work any better because most applications will remain single-threaded.
9. AMD will release a family chips that use less electricity and have more cores and claim they are better than the Intel versions, but no one will be able to tell if they work any better either.
10. Microsoft will take over Yahoo after winning the company as a booby prize in a raffle.
What the heck, it is the week between Christmas and New Year. Make your own pointless technology predictions below. µ
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Telephones will be replaced by robot pidgeons capable of long range flight
Java programmers will look one morning in the mirror and realize that Java has become the new COBOL.
1. New gadget "inventions" will again be just overpriced exaggerations of current ones and will become obsolete in 2-3 months.
2. OSes will become even more bloated.
3. Desktop computers will become more expensive to force everyone to switch to portable ones once and for all.
4. Governments and companies that donate money to elections (e.g. MAFIAA) will spy into our data streams more and more, while P2P "piracy" will keep growing exponentially.
5. Industry will come up with more entangled and flawed DRM "solutions" that will once again be easily circumvented by real pirates and will harm only legit customers and small pirate wannabes.
6. People will keep paying arms and legs for the so-called intellectual properties while they don't really own it, just are licensed to use it exactly how the companies want, until they want.
7. Computer languages (specially Java) will bring another batch of super-cool new technologies and methodologies whose names are made of 2-5 capital letters that aren't really new things, while thousands of programmer wannabes will rush to pay for lessons and certifications to bloat even more their pompous resumes.
8. Dozens of complicated, flawed, senseless and incompatible new IT "standards" will be forced down our throats.
9. Cloud applications will again prove themselves sluggish, limited and downright impractical.
10. There still will have no cure for the flu and umbrellas will still be extremely inefficient against heavy rain.
Nothing will change.
By 2015 Nick Farrell will have amassed so many trolls hanging on his every word that he will have to rent out a sports arena for his birthday party.
Also by 2015, the above mentioned trolls will FINALLY get a clue and get the whole point behind The Inq. Their collective sighs of "ahh, I get it" will disrupt communications satellites for hours.
Cobol and Fortran will finally die in 3010
I don't know if you were joking or not, but it seems FORTRAN will never die, as academics keep resurrecting it.
@Muttley9, I'm guessing the hype around cloud computing will fall flat on its face in 2010 and it will become a useful, but niche, thing from 2010 onwards (just like thin clients).
with a superior sensor and software system driving Pentax and a few others out.
Apple's tablet will do for e-readers what ipod did for music and iphone did for telecommunications - turning the content market upside down and leading to further consolidations among content providers (including newspapers). And catching naysayers totally off guard.
Jen-Hsun Huang will be ousted as the CEO of NVIDIA and replaced by Charlie Demerjian.
...will still fail to tell customers that any "hosted" service or software depends on connectivity first and foremost.
Or that cutting and pasting large amounts of data into a Google spreadsheet is a hideous joke; either originally or replacing the original values.
COBOL will die. And FORTRAN.
Fun article, thanks for wasting a little time. A footnote: half of the WSJ's Top 10 worst tech predictions come from a Dec 2008 article in a "gadget magazine", T3. Here's the list from last year: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3690203/Bill-Gates-and-Sir-Alan-Sugar-made-some-of-worse-technology-predictions-of-all-time.html, which contains five more edifying items.
A guy called Steven Schnaars explained the systematic failure of technology predictions over ten years ago in a book called Megamistakes (http://tinyurl.com/yddnns5). Basically, the huge majority of predicted breakthroughs happen later and much more gradually than expected (e.g. reliable programming, which is still as far off as ever). But a tiny minority explode on an unsuspecting world without ever having been predicted at all (e.g. Java).
As to the standard notorious predictions cited in the article, Watson was talking about "computers" in the 1950s sense - what we nowadays call scientific supercomputers. No one had yet realised computers could be used for anything except massive scientific calculations - hence the name "computer", which (when you come to think of it) is a bit weird for a device mainly used for email, Web browsing, and watching video clips. With that stipulation, while Watson's estimate was still wildly wrong, it was a few orders of magnitude better than it looks.
As for the "plywood box" crack, the guy obviously hadn't registered the dawn of the Age of Plastic. But otherwise, I can't fault his insight in any way.
eReaders suddenly become immensely popular after signing up a deal to have the Sun on them distributed freely every day...later analisis (I know its spelt wrong) shows users stick to only using Page 3 and eReaders with easy wipe screens soon follow ;)
"People will continue to complain about INQ tongue-in-cheek and will change absolutely nothing."
Shouldn't that have read "Tongue INQ Cheek?"
Any surface will be AdSensed.
-Bio-electronic trees with AdSense
-Additional EtherAd Layer to the IP Stack
-Free clean water supply to Africa with minerals additives (mainly Chromium)
-SETI will find that messages from outer space are AdSensed
hm.......
People will still slag off Apple's products for being expensive and controlling. People will still buy them cos they are better than all the competition.
I'll still read the Inquirer for tongue-in-the-cheek Technology news.
11. The Inq. will finally wise up and FIRE the two-bit hack Nick Farrell, otherwise known as Der Ferret.
Whats Ever Happened to My 80,000 Volt Core. Hammering on Was delight.
InSide Of Mind Will Turn to Pulp, With NO Passage Past Calcium Barrier. Wide End of Stockage will Slip Over head, yet Narrow End or ENDentry Point will Then Pull Up & Crush Neck, Agghhhh. Hanging Delight. Sell About One Copy Ea.
Sleeping In WombBed with Birth Control Devices will BeCome Common.RED Blankets In Morning, ALL Sailors warning.
Next AMD Will Start CES on5Jan'010. Vast Improvements will Be In Optical Cameras & Other FUN Family Stuff on Floor from 7Jan'010. Rahul Will Be Stuck In Avalanche In Vancover.
Entire theINQ Staff Will Be ReHired & Given Mexican Equivalent of Congressional Medal of Honor.
drashek
that rolls out like a newspaper. One side will be a color e-reader using very little power, and the other side will be an LCD for moving video and graphics. Because of Moore's Law, the favorite use for the thing by users will be as a...
mirror when you don't have one available.
E-reader screens will become so cheap that people will begin wearing them as clothing. Cafepress.com (may have website wrong) will go from selling t-shirts to simply uploading patterns for people to pick from. This will cause much turmoil in the fancy clothing stores, since people will be able to simply have a picture on themselves of the latest style.
* The Apple Tablet will be launched, bought by the fanboys, then die a death as people realise its just a Newton.
* Google will drink the mobile phone companies milkshake with a really smart and sneaky move on the Googlephone.
* Murdoch will die, and with him the end of the newspaper publishing industry. In their death they will spawn an even worse copyright act - and people will finally tell the politicians where they can stick it - graphically.
* Hot on the heels of the Apple ARM chip will come the Google ARM chip and the end of Intel as Chipzilla.
* The broadcasters will be gradually removed as the intermediaries they are in visual media - channels will break apart.
* The global depression and oil shock will speed the move to a local< global world, bypassing national boundaries.
The Timelords are coming back, and they're bringing Psion with them.
Any IT journalist who gives a negative review is thanked for their opinion.
who will then lease it to contracters as a way to save money spying on citizens while following govt guidelines.
More "predictions" for (St.) Nick:
1) The Pixel-Qi screen will become the "next big thing" in all display-carrying devices.
2) Tablets (made by Apple, Asus, and various others) will displace both netbooks and dedicated e-book readers in the marketplace, and will take a chunk out of the laptop and smartphone markets as well.
3) Microsoft will happen to glance at the text of Ballmer's "developers, developers, developers" rant in a mirror, and note that the first letters of these words reversed are "666" -- numbers which seem to also be visible on Ballmer's forehead when he sweats heavily (i.e., most of the time). They will move him into the Microsoft Security Essentials virus chest, but not before the organizational root kits and mal-management he produced cause permanent damage, leading Google, Linux companies, and Apple to combine to displace Microsoft as an IT market leader.
4) I will apply to and be accepted by the Inquirer as a rumour-monger writer in the fine tradition of past Inq. hacks.
Ballmer probably should join a monastery, which would allow his company to be saved by someone else who is willing to embrace open-source. But Ballmer won't (join a monastery, OR embrace open-source).
You see, he wouldn't be able to survive in a monastery, as you have to have a quiet voice, and you're not allowed to throw chairs (a favorite hobby of Ballmer's).
Ballmer also won't embrace open-source. He could win the mobile wars by scrapping Windows Mobile Phone (which will eventually be scrapped anyway), and create a new OS, basing it on Linux. A Linux phone OS would get to market quickly, with less development costs, get updated quickly, and be a better platform. But that would upset the Microsoft decades-old tradition of slow development, running years late with each OS update, and having buggy software when it is eventually released.
People will continue to complain about INQ tongue-in-cheek and will change absolutely nothing.
... sues MS for "Natal Elbow".
The inquierer will write a half decent technology article, half of it's half will be interesting and it will be commented with sense by someone named drashek