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Cringely's 2006 Results, 2007 Predictions

Posted by Zonk on Sat Jan 06, 2007 04:38 AM
from the seer-of-seers-prognosticator-of-prognosticators dept.
IT Technology
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.'"
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Cringely's 2006 Results, 2007 Predictions 50 Comments More /

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  • This guy should run a stock tip sheet.
  • Will Vista be the Zune of operating systems?

    • Re:Question for 2007: (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane (209368) on Saturday January 06 2007, @04:57AM (#17486516)
      Why? because it's brown [microsoft.com] or because it's expensive?

    • Re:Question for 2007: (Score:4, Informative)

      by gkhan1 (886823) <oskarsigvardsson AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday January 06 2007, @06:37AM (#17486810)
      Seeing as it's gonna come preinstalled on pretty much every new computer sold in the next year, I doubt it. There's gonna be dozens (if not hundreds) of millions of Vista users by the end of the year. Believe it
      • dozens of millions computers were sold with windows ME pre-installed, and most of them ended up dowgraded to win98 so the owners could wait for XP.

        the shiatloads of DRM in vista alone are a good reason to downgrade.

        • Re:Question for 2007: (Score:4, Insightful)

          by gkhan1 (886823) <oskarsigvardsson AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday January 06 2007, @07:16AM (#17486914)
          It's an idiotic comparison. ME was an in-between, a sideshow to keep the customers happy (and look how well that went) while the real OS was being developed. Vista is one of the largest investments microsoft has ever made. They're gonna push it hard. And virtually everyone who buys it (certainly corporations) won't care one iota about all the DRM stuff. "Look at all that pretty glass!" is going to be way, way more important.

          • Re:Question for 2007: (Score:4, Insightful)

            by unother (712929) * on Saturday January 06 2007, @08:45AM (#17487210)
            I don't think anyone is going to "buy" Vista. At least, not in a fundamental sense. Certainly, corporations won't... most large companies are just moving from 2000 to XP, and that's only because Microsoft has pulled the support rug from under them. For the average company there is not one compelling reason to move forward quickly.

            It's not like this is rocket science. Large companies were still running Windows 3.1 until 1997, and then moved to Windows NT 4. The move from that to 2000 was about five years ago. The move from Windows 3.1 to NT was obviously needed due to sheer obsolescence; the move from NT to 2000 was the same, albeit to a smaller degree (USB support, AD support).

            Vista is really an OS for consumers and to ensure Microsoft has a new product as promised. I see nothing good coming from Vista in the end. In many ways, it is the new ME: a stop-gap OS...

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Carbonite (183181)
              I don't think anyone is going to "buy" Vista. At least, not in a fundamental sense.

              When a company or consumer buys a new PC with Vista preinstalled, part of the purchase price is for the OS. Just because they're not buying a boxed upgrade version doesn't mean they're not buying Vista. This is how Microsoft sold the vast majority of XP, so there's not much of a change here.

              • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                by vtcodger (957785)
                Typically when a company buys a new PC, they get to specify the OS from short list -- XP home, XP Professional, and apparently more varieties of Vista than anyone is likely to be able to keep straight. Until relatively recently W2K, W2K professional, and Windows 98 would have been on the list as well.. (Yes the pricing for each and every one will be different). It's only home users that buy a box off the shelf who get the one-size-fits-all OEM OS with no idea of its cost and no real choice.

                Even a home

            • "I don't think anyone is going to "buy" Vista."

              True, unless of course they are buying it to run under Boot Camp on a Mac. ;-)

  • Refreshing to see a pundit... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dobeln (853794) on Saturday January 06 2007, @04:47AM (#17486484)
    ...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.)

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 91degrees (207121)
      He gains some kudos for admitting he was wrong about OSX running on generic hardware. Other pundits would have insisted they were right.

  • I like number 10 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jack Malmostoso (899729) on Saturday January 06 2007, @04:47AM (#17486486)
    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...
    • That sounds like an interesting story - why not submit it as a story?

    • Re:I like number 10 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SpectralDesign (921309) on Saturday January 06 2007, @07:25AM (#17486938)
      Curious!

      I'm on Rogers HighSpeed in Canada, and lately they've been shaping BT traffic, and the past few months having intermittent connectivity issues -- just a couple or few days ago the service wasn't working, but the lights on the modem all appeared fine... Needless to say, I didn't want to call customer support to be on hold for an hour or more and finally be told that they were working on the problem and to try it again the next day (useless!) so after a few hours and several resets of the modem I decided to try a ping from my router and lo and behold, it worked...

      I punched in the IP for a DNS server that I knew of, and used that to get the numbers for OpenDNS and now have my router issuing those with DHCP requests instead of the Rogers DNS servers. Funny -- everything has been working just fine since I made that change.

      Is Telecom Itialia also owned by Ted Turner?!? At any rate, it seems they went to the same "We've Oversubscribed, What Can We Do Now?" convention as each other.... Bastards!

  • Easy prediction on DRM (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (209368) on Saturday January 06 2007, @04:55AM (#17486506)
    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...

    • Re:Easy prediction on DRM (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dogers (446369) on Saturday January 06 2007, @06:07AM (#17486736)
      Oh, somebody always wins with DRM.

      The companies that create DRM schemes, of course!

      • Re:Easy prediction on DRM (Score:5, Insightful)

        by StringBlade (557322) on Saturday January 06 2007, @08:38AM (#17487184) Journal
        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.

        I view DRM scheme creators in a similar light to anti-virus software makers: their task is never-ending because they are attacking the symptoms of a problem, not the problem itself and it's a very thankless job.

        • I view DRM scheme creators in a similar light to anti-virus software makers: their task is never-ending because they are attacking the symptoms of a problem, not the problem itself and it's a very thankless job.

          Flawed alternative problem in case 2:
          No technological solution exists for a social problem.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Dogers (446369)

          their DRM scheme either becomes a publicity nightmare (like Sony's rootkit)

          By which time the company that created the DRM will have received their payment and have already laughed all the way to the bank

          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.

          Likewise as before, the company will have received their payment, and probably have been hard at work on the next iteration ready for t

    • As soon as a DRM scheme emerges at the top it will be broken. DRM is an impractical notion so it's not really surprising.

  • A bit wrong... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Karganeth (1017580) on Saturday January 06 2007, @05:06AM (#17486550)
    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.

    • Re:A bit wrong... (Score:4, Funny)

      by PopeRatzo (965947) on Saturday January 06 2007, @05:38AM (#17486658) Homepage Journal
      That's the UK, Bro. It's not real if it don't happen Stateside.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Andy_R (114137)
        Good old America, the only place that can call something a world series without noticing they haven't invited any other countries... but back on topic, the chart rules when Gnarls Barkley hit number 1 excluded songs that were truly internet only, you had to have a physical CD or vinyl release. You were allowed to issue the download up to a week before the physical release hit the shops, and it was this rule that allowed them to number 1 before the physical release hit the shops. Recently the rules have been
    • Isn't the UK the market where a Celphone ringtone hit the pop charts?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by cofaboy (718205)
        Yes, that would be that poxy crazy frog ditty. Yes that was the UK

        /me hangs head in shame at poor taste of young Brits

    • When he said "recognized as existing" he clearly meant by the record industry (ie the one behind RIAA and the Grammies). Gnarls Barkley of course did not win Grammy.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Gnarls Barkley - Crazy won a shitload of awards and was the best selling song of last year. BREAKING NEWS: You live under a rock.

  • 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.

  • umm 69%? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by atari2600 (545988) on Saturday January 06 2007, @05:21AM (#17486608)
    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.

  • MS support? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by headpushslap (583517) on Saturday January 06 2007, @05:22AM (#17486610)
    "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.
  • 10) The year the net crashed (in the USA)
    I hear it will happen on July 4 [imdb.com]

  • Tecos and cablecos raped our asses for decades (Score:4, Insightful)

    by crovira (10242) on Saturday January 06 2007, @09:50AM (#17487534) Homepage
    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.

  • This guy... try 40%, anyone have to add to this? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zebra_X (13249) on Saturday January 06 2007, @11:07AM (#17488120)
    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

    • Intel DID rebrand (Score:4, Informative)

      by aztektum (170569) on Saturday January 06 2007, @01:54PM (#17489720)
      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by kfg (145172)
      Why don't they (the RIAA) just lossy-encode and decode all songs before releasing them on CD?

      Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just use a tin can on a string for a microphone?

      KFG

    • Re:Help for the RIAA (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dangitman (862676) on Saturday January 06 2007, @07:45AM (#17487000)
      Because recompressed files are perfectly acceptable to most people, who wouldn't even notice the difference. Only a miniscule number of people would find it "unacceptable." And most of them probably couldn't hear the difference anyway - it's all ego like those "Monster Cables" and other shit that appeals to "audiophiles."
    • 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 rea

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