General

2009 is coming to a close, so it's time to look at my predictions for the year and determine how well I did.

• Apple will produce neither a netbook nor a tablet device this year, or likely any year. They will, however, produce a smaller and cheaper iPhone. This 4GB model will be called the iPhone Nano, or iPhone Mini and sell for under $150. They will release it to carriers other than AT&T. AT&T signed an exclusivity deal worth millions to be the only carrier with the iPhone. Apple will claim that the deal was only for the iPhone, and that this new model is something different. AT&T will sue, but the lawsuit won't resolve for some time. Apple will offer CDMA prototypes, but neither Sprint nor Verizon will be interested. Sprint and Verizon are still trying to market their own music stores, and they will not want the competition from iTunes.

I was correct that Apple wasn't going to produce a netbook or tablet in 2009. I missed the boat with the smaller iPhone, but I was spot on with the cheaper model. I had incorrectly assumed that it would be a 4GB phone. Instead, Apple introduced a higher-end model, and moved the existing model downmarket to a price well below $150.

Apple didn't release their phone for other carriers in the US, but they did diversify outside of the US. I've got a prediction for 2010 that covers this, but that's a subject for another post.

• Now that Apple has 10% of the total PC market, and 14% of the consumer market, they will be hit by their first genuine virus this year. Since the iPhone also runs a variant of OSX, it might be affected too. The bug will be nasty enough for Apple to start taking security seriously. Remember that hacking challenge last year? The Apple computer was the first to be hacked and exploited. Apple has been able to avoid spyware, trojans and viruses because of they lack the numbers to make such work profitable. That's starting to change.

I'm very surprised that Mac's didn't experience a major virus this year. However, there were a couple of nasty viruses for hacked iPhones, which runs a very similar OS. I still feel this is an inevitable situation. Apple still doesn't take security as seriously as Microsoft. It's just a matter of time before someone takes advantage of that. 10 million devices on the AT&T network would be a pretty nice zombie army. Just saying.

• Cerebus will realize that the only way to turn a profit with Chrysler is to part it out. Unfortunately for them, the only part that's remotely interesting is Jeep. Jeep will be sold to either Mercedes, because they share so many parts, or to a company needing a decent Truck/SUV platform... think Honda, Hyundai or Tata. The rest of the company will be sold off for intellectual property (i.e. the hemi engine) but no one will actually make another Dodge car again. The exception being the Dodge Viper. The rights to which will be purchased by a small specialty company like Shelby or Saleen. They'll start making the Viper again sometime in 2012.

If Obama hadn't stepped in and saved Detroit, I think this could have happened. The auto industry was crazy this year, and it'll probably still be crazy next year. A lot of brands disappeared. Some might return in five or ten years. Most will never be heard of again. The big winner really appears to be Ford. Ford sold Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo at the right time when the prices were high. They sat on a pile of cash large enough to avoid having to be bailed out by the feds. And their stock price has soared. I'm still kicking myself for selling at $7.70 per share. Yes, I nearly doubled my initial investment. But today it's trading at over $10/share.

• Comcast will release a new DVR using technology "stolen" from TiVo. Comcast and TiVo have been partnered for almost two years now, and they've only had limited test releases in small markets. It's not moving forward, and I believe it's because Comcast is buying time. TiVo will sue Comcast for the stolen IP, and they might win... sometime in 2011. That is, if they're still in business.

This was a bold prediction, one which I didn't really have that much faith in. I have no idea what's going on with Comcast and TiVo. Their partnered box has now been in "beta" for over a year with no progress in sight. If the software works, then it should be deployed. If it's failing, then the project should have been cut by now. If this is an example of how Comcast does business, then I feel sorry for everyone who works at NBC. I'd care more... but I've moved on to DirecTV.

• There will be at least a dozen phones running Google's Android software by the end of the year. Unfortunately they'll all suck. A smartphone platform which doesn't support a To-Do list? It's as if Google employees have never worked in an office which uses Exchange. The real area where Android could take off is in budget phones, such as the Motorola RAZR, where the carriers can save money by using a "free" OS. However in those cases the devices will still suffer by having a poor radio stack, since Google wrote code for supporting the phones in as a secondary priority to writing an OS which supports Google web apps.

As I write this, pdadb.net lists 16 android devices available on the market. Most of which are not available in the US, but that's pretty much what I expected. AT&T is the only major carrier in the US without an Android phone, but I'm sure that will change in 2010.

By and large, the Android phones still suck. Yes, the Motorola Droid is a 4th quarter surprise... but do you know anyone who owns one? Now how many people do you know with an iPhone? Generally speaking, people I know are interested in the android platform... but just to play with, not to use. They're buying blackberries and iphones, not android phones. Or at least not as their primary phone.

• The US will be put into a precarious position when either the Iraqi or Afghani government comes out in support of Palastine and offers military aide against Isreal. But this won't be the true test of Obama's leadership in the first year. Instead it'll come later this summer when the gang war along the US/Mexico border escalates. The Mexican army, which is reportedly corrupt, will be caught crossing the US border and attacking US citizens (albeit criminal ones).

Predicting foreign policy is obviously not my strong point.

• Obama will pick a "nobody" for his CTO. It won't be Larry Lessig, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or The Woz. Probably someone who was a VP for HP or IBM. The CTO will likely be someone who supports the RIAA/MPAA. There will be no patent reform under this CTO, and we'll continue to see lawsuits over ideas that should have never been patented in the first place.

Nailed it. Aneesh Chopra is more than just a nobody, he's a total joke. He's not even qualified to be a VP for HP or IBM. He supports the RIAA/MPAA, and probably doesn't even comprehend the problems with existing patent laws.

• Steve Balmer will announce his retirement in 5 years. He won't announce his successor for another three years. The real story will be that the board forced him to retire. Under his leadership, Microsoft has lost marketshare for the first time in it's existence. The failure to procure a deal with Yahoo highlights the lack of vision and the lack of ability that Balmer possesses.

I'm really surprised this didn't happen.

• A Pushing Daisies movie will be announced, probably in a direct-to-video product. The movie will wrap up any loose ties left in the series that ABC has foolishly decided to cancel.

This was announced, but I haven't heard anything new about it. I suspect it's caught in development hell and may never be produced.

• Despite losing millions on the PS3, Sony will continue to push it's failed console onto the marketplace. They will not lower the price, and they will not have a "killer app". They'll release some sort of Wii like controller, which will be overly expensive and not be supported by anything more than 2 games.... both of which will not be fun to play. Many former Playstation exclusives will start to jump ship to the 360 and Wii. The only place on Earth where the PS3 will sell well is in Japan, and it will still sell fewer consoles than the Wii. It will also lose the title of "best bluray player" this year.

I couldn't remember if Sony had lowered the price of the PS3 or not, it was such a non-event. Supposedly they are now able to make a meager profit on the console itself, which is nice. Especially since they still are lacking a real system seller. At E3 they did announce a motion controller, but hardly anyone noticed. The controllers looked silly compared to Microsoft's Natal, and the demo's were embarassing.

It's hard to tell if the PS3 is still the best blu-ray player on the market anymore, but it's certainly one of the most expensive. Walmart had $70 blu-ray players for Christmas. Even if it doesn't have the upgradability of the PS3, at a savings of $220... who cares!

• I have a bonus prediction... I predict that the average price of gas in the US as tracked by AAA will not exceed $3 per gallon this year.

When I made this prediction, the memory of $5/gallon gas was fresh in our minds. As far as I can tell, the AAA tracked price never went above $2.70/gallon.

Knowledge of Club Foot treatments are poor in pediatric medicine, despite having one out of every thousand births with this defect. Tina and I were taking her 20 week ultrasound when we discovered that Patrick had a club foot. The ultrasound specialist was not really aware of the issue, and told us that it was likely that Patrick had Edwards Disease, a fatal genetic trisomy where children rarely live more than 10 days after birth. He was wrong, and sadly he is not alone in the medical profession.

Most children who are born with a club foot have to endure painful surgeries which fail to adequately correct the defect. They spend the rest of their lives with pain in their feet, ankles and legs. They have difficulty standing, walking or running.

Fortunately the world was given Dr. Ponseti. Dr. Ponseti developed a surgery free method that has a 98% success rate. It's simple enough that it can be used in small villages of third world countries with nearly the same success rate. For reasons which are not clear to me, Dr. Ponseti's method was not widely adopted outside of his home state of Iowa until the 1990's. It's sad to think of all the children born in that time who could have been spared the pain of surgeries and the ongoing difficulties brought on by them.

Dr. Ponseti continued to practice medicine into his 90's and up to the week he died. He passed away last week after suffering a stroke at his office.

I am grateful for Dr. Ponseti's work, and the efforts of Dr. Mosca and Dr. J at Seattle's Childrens Hospital for using the Ponseti Method on my son. His club foot is corrected. He is walking without pain. He will likely never even know he had a defective foot.

Dr. Ponseti Passes Away at Age 95

Since Macworld is this Tuesday, and some of my predictions involve Apple, I might as well get this list out ASAP.

• Apple will produce neither a netbook nor a tablet device this year, or likely any year. They will, however, produce a smaller and cheaper iPhone. This 4GB model will be called the iPhone Nano, or iPhone Mini and sell for under $150. They will release it to carriers other than AT&T. AT&T signed an exclusivity deal worth millions to be the only carrier with the iPhone. Apple will claim that the deal was only for the iPhone, and that this new model is something different. AT&T will sue, but the lawsuit won't resolve for some time. Apple will offer CDMA prototypes, but neither Sprint nor Verizon will be interested. Sprint and Verizon are still trying to market their own music stores, and they will not want the competition from iTunes.
  
  
• Now that Apple has 10% of the total PC market, and 14% of the consumer market, they will be hit by their first genuine virus this year. Since the iPhone also runs a variant of OSX, it might be affected too. The bug will be nasty enough for Apple to start taking security seriously. Remember that hacking challenge last year? The Apple computer was the first to be hacked and exploited. Apple has been able to avoid spyware, trojans and viruses because of they lack the numbers to make such work profitable. That's starting to change.
  
  
• Cerebus will realize that the only way to turn a profit with Chrysler is to part it out. Unfortunately for them, the only part that's remotely interesting is Jeep. Jeep will be sold to either Mercedes, because they share so many parts, or to a company needing a decent Truck/SUV platform... think Honda, Hyundai or Tata. The rest of the company will be sold off for intellectual property (i.e. the hemi engine) but no one will actually make another Dodge car again. The exception being the Dodge Viper. The rights to which will be purchased by a small specialty company like Shelby or Saleen. They'll start making the Viper again sometime in 2012.
  
  
• Comcast will release a new DVR using technology "stolen" from TiVo. Comcast and TiVo have been partnered for almost two years now, and they've only had limited test releases in small markets. It's not moving forward, and I believe it's because Comcast is buying time. TiVo will sue Comcast for the stolen IP, and they might win... sometime in 2011. That is, if they're still in business.
  
  
• There will be at least a dozen phones running Google's Android software by the end of the year. Unfortunately they'll all suck. A smartphone platform which doesn't support a To-Do list? It's as if Google employees have never worked in an office which uses Exchange. The real area where Android could take off is in budget phones, such as the Motorola RAZR, where the carriers can save money by using a "free" OS. However in those cases the devices will still suffer by having a poor radio stack, since Google wrote code for supporting the phones in as a secondary priority to writing an OS which supports Google web apps.
  
  
• The US will be put into a precarious position when either the Iraqi or Afghani government comes out in support of Palastine and offers military aide against Isreal. But this won't be the true test of Obama's leadership in the first year. Instead it'll come later this summer when the gang war along the US/Mexico border escalates. The Mexican army, which is reportedly corrupt, will be caught crossing the US border and attacking US citizens (albeit criminal ones).
  
  
• Obama will pick a "nobody" for his CTO. It won't be Larry Lessig, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or The Woz. Probably someone who was a VP for HP or IBM. The CTO will likely be someone who supports the RIAA/MPAA. There will be no patent reform under this CTO, and we'll continue to see lawsuits over ideas that should have never been patented in the first place.
  
  
• Steve Balmer will announce his retirement in 5 years. He won't announce his successor for another three years. The real story will be that the board forced him to retire. Under his leadership, Microsoft has lost marketshare for the first time in it's existence. The failure to procure a deal with Yahoo highlights the lack of vision and the lack of ability that Balmer possesses.
  
  
• A Pushing Daisies movie will be announced, probably in a direct-to-video product. The movie will wrap up any loose ties left in the series that ABC has foolishly decided to cancel.
  
  
• Despite losing millions on the PS3, Sony will continue to push it's failed console onto the marketplace. They will not lower the price, and they will not have a "killer app". They'll release some sort of Wii like controller, which will be overly expensive and not be supported by anything more than 2 games.... both of which will not be fun to play. Many former Playstation exclusives will start to jump ship to the 360 and Wii. The only place on Earth where the PS3 will sell well is in Japan, and it will still sell fewer consoles than the Wii. It will also lose the title of "best bluray player" this year.
  

There you have it. Ten fresh predictions for the new year. I'll report back on this in 2010 to see how well I scored.

Update: I have a bonus prediction... I predict that the average price of gas in the US as tracked by AAA will not exceed $3 per gallon this year.

Back in January of 2008 I made a few predictions of what to expect in 2008. I was inspired by Robert X. Cringley's annual predictions. Typically he does pretty well, usually around 80% accurate. This year he was only right on 50% of his predictions... did I do any better?

Netflix will license with many partners including TiVo and Microsoft to sell their rental service through set-top boxes once Microsoft finalizes Silverlight 2.0 which it will use for DRM. Their selection will be poor, but it will be superior to a similar setup from Apple and will support Win32, OSX and Linux based platforms.

Spot on. Netflix did indeed setup rental services for XBOX, and TiVo services are coming one day. You can now stream netflix video to Mac's, but not Linux yet. Apple did try to push rentals on the AppleTV platform, but it's such a poor seller that it wasn't a significant part of the marketplace.

New DRM "solutions" will be introduced in 2008. None of them will do a thing to hinder online piracy.

This was a bit of a no-brainer. Studios did try new DRM solutions, and yet piracy continues to grow. Eventually media owners will realize that the public wants a non-limited product. When their choices are a crippled product at a large price versus a free unlimited product, it's no wonder.

HD-DVD and Bluray will continue to fight it out in the marketplace, but neither will be a winner. Dual-format players will continue to be more expensive than purchasing two standalone players. The PS3 will continue to be the best Bluray player on the market.

I totally blew this one. About a week after I made this prediction, HD-DVD was dead. However I was correct that dual-format players were more expensive, and that the PS3 is still the best bluray player on the market.

Based on the success of the iphone, nearly everyone will have a touch-interface smartphone in 2008. Although none of them, including Apple, will manage to get around the fact that a touchscreen is a lousy way to type e-mails.

Another accurate prediction. The marketplace is flooded with poorly implemented touchscreen phones. RIM rushed their touch-based BlackBerry to the market, and the market has responded. It's an awful phone. No one has managed to create a decent text input method on a touchscreen phone. The best solution is still something like the HTC devices with slide-out keyboards.

Apple will upset the music industry by creating it's own music label. However this will backfire on Apple as the big labels leave iTunes for the alternatives from Amazon, Walmart, etc.

I still think this will happen, and there were signs of baby steps this year. Apple has started offering music from independent artists, who sell their music exclusively through the iTunes store. Apple handles the marketing and distribution of these songs. That means that Apple is acting as a music label for these artists, they're just not calling it that.

Increasing disdain of Vista, and millions spent on marketing Macs will finally get Apple's percentage of the marketshare into double-digits.

I almost thought this wasn't going to happen, but earlier today reports were released showing that Apple indeed has 10% of the market, and probably closer to 14% of the consumer marketplace.

The digital switchover scheduled for February 2009 will be pushed back yet again because no one really understands what it means.

This could still happen, but not in 2008. I'm now confident that the transition will happen on time. I can imagine a situation where the transition happens, people complain, congress demands that the FCC reverse the transition, and by the time they do it everyone who originally complained has already purchased a converter box making the reversal unnecessary.

UPDATE: Looks like my original prediction was correct. Obama's campaign is asking that the switchover date be pushed back another 6 months.

No one will have a commercially produced electric car until at least 2010. Sorry to all those folks who pre-ordered a Tesla Roadster.

Partly right, partly wrong. Tesla did release a handful of roadsters in 2008, but far fewer than they had originally predicted.

The following people will die in 2008: Britney Spears, Ted Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Jerry Lewis, Courtney Love, Nancy Regan, Gary Coleman, Bob Dylan, Pervez Musharraf and Thailands King Bhumibol.

This was the first time I have ever made a "dead pool" prediction, and I will never make one again. When reports of Ted Kennedy's brain cancer showed up in the papers, I was initially excited that my prediction might come true. It was quickly followed by massive guilt and shame. Fortunately everyone on my list survived 2008.

Rudy Guliani will be elected President of the United States of America.

No comment.

So three predictions were totally wrong, two were partially wrong, and five were dead-on. That's a bit better than 50% overall, and better than Cringley. Not bad. Next week I'll have ten new predictions.