December 22, 2010 Binary Blogger 2010 prediction's Reviewed

At the start of every year I make 10 predictions. Here is my post from last year. Let's break it down and see how I did.

Preditction #1 - 2010 will be the year of tablets.
Verdict - I will say this is semi-accurate. The stage is set for tablets to boom and leave netbooks in the dust, but 
so far iPad and the Galaxy are the only legitimate ones out. Still very young.


Prediction #2 - A major cell phone provider will announce a multi-Billion dollar project to upgrade the country's infrastructure to the cellular GSM network.
Verdict - FAIL. This one was a long shot and technically improbable, but a guy can dream.

Prediction #3 - There will be a targeted cyber-attack against the Internet's backbone DNS servers.

Verdict - FAIL. Thankfully I got this one wrong. But still a very viable threat.

Prediction #4 - There will be a "Facebook-killer" that will come online

Verdict - FAIL. A few have tried, but Facebook just increased their empire over the year.

Prediction #5 - A music purchasing site will drastically alter the copyright debate. It might be iTunes, Amazon, WalMart or a new comer. If you buy a song you own it for life to use on whatever device you choose.

Verdict - FAIL. Same old restrictions.

Prediction #6 - Netflix will announce that 30-60 days after initial release, new mainstream movies will be available for HD streaming.

Verdict - Semi-accurate. Some movies studios have announced that they will start this practice, not all, but some. There is word that for a really high price, new theater releases will be available online as well, but this is far out yet.

Prediction #7 - Twitter will go through a major re-design and implement a pay service model.

Verdict - Semi-accurate. Twitter did go through a major UI and API overhaul, still no ad based services yet. However some 3rd party twitter sites are moving to ad revenue streams.

Prediction #8 - Newspapers will finally realize that printing news that is the same as what's online for free and old by the time to hits the streets doesn't make money.

Verdict - Semi-accurate. Newspapers didn't realize they were losing money, they already knew that. But instead of changing the content, there is a swing to move to pay based, table editions instead. 2011 will see this wave.

Prediction #9 - Google Wave will begin it's full force transition to replace Gmail

Verdict - COMPLETE FAIL. A mix of bad PR and horrible UI doomed Google Wave, I was a fan, I saw it's game changing future but it was too radical a shift for mainstream to grab on.

Prediction #10 - Mainstream Cloud Computing adoption will be slow.

Verdict - Accurate. Cloud computing has become a marketing term for things that are not cloud based. Image editing? Really Microsoft? But in reality cloud computing is a virtualized environment and we have been doing that for over 10 years.

Not bad, I would say I was about 50/50. A few stretches in there, but close nonetheless. 

Time to go work on 2011 predictions.

End of Line.

Posted in: Internet,Technology