Wild Predictions for a Wired 2007

An anonymous reader writes "Wired has put up its predictions for the coming year, in technology, internet, and entertainment news. Despite their claim that they are 'wild' predictions, a lot of them make some sense. Some of their calls: 'Google Stock Hits $1,000 per Share. Internet Traffic Doubles to 5,000 petabits per day by the end of 2007. And 80 percent of it is peer-to-peer file sharing, mostly Skype video and BitTorrent. BitTorrent on TiVo: Speaking of, digital video recorders get BitTorrent baked in, bringing internet video to the living room. Spam Doubles: No-brainer -- but no one cares because we're all using IM, especially at work. Second Life Ends a Life: Skullduggery in Second Life -- probably digital adultery -- ends in a real-life murder. Year o' the Laptop: Half of all new computers sold in 2007 will be laptops and 20 percent of those will be Apple's MacBooks." What do you folks think? How many will Wired have called correctly by the end of the year?

One fix

[SnarfQuest]

Internet Traffic Doubles to 5,000 petabits per day by the end of 2007. And 80 percent of it is peer-to-peer file sharing, mostly Skype video and BitTorrent.

Change that "spam", and then I'd believe it.

Re:Wired is a contra indicator

[Rachel Lucid]

Second Life is catching on as more computers are able to handle 3D-Rendering. A good friend of mine who'll be working at Google shortly got completely hooked on it a couple months ago and won't shut up about it now.

So, sure, I'll buy the whole second-life prediction.

A Bit Premature

[Silver Sloth]

Greenland Becomes Green

As the ice melts, Greenland becomes literally green.

It will take a few more years (or even decades) yet. It might not even happen, we should stop calling it 'Global Warming' and start calling it 'Climate Change' otherwise it gives this idea that everywhere will become some sort of tropical paradise. We Brits could do with some warming but, if some of the predictions about the gulf stream are correct, we'll actually get colder.

they forgot to mention...

[teh_chrizzle]

that this is the year of linux on the desktop and that this is the year that sun's "whatever the hell we are calling thin clients this year" breaks the MS stranglehold on the corporate desktop.

i don't think either will happen, but some crackpot makes that prediction every year. this year, it would appear that cackpot is me :-)

Apple laptops?

[NineNine]

Half of all new computers sold in 2007 will be laptops and 20 percent of those will be Apple's MacBooks."

I doubt this. But then, Wired has always been even bigger Apple shills than Slashdot is.

interesting, not necessarily agreed...

[jimstapleton]

Year o' the Laptop Half of all new computers sold in 2007 will be laptops and 20 percent of those will be Apple's MacBooks.

With the popularity of notebooks, I can see this, except for the 20% by Apple, I doubt they'll surpass 10-15% at best.

Print to Web A major newspaper gives up printing on paper to publish exclusively online.

Not sure that this'll happen, unless you want to stretch the definition of "a major newpaper".

HD-DVD Wins HD-DVD is the clear winner over Blu-ray in the DVD format wars. Oh yeah, and the PS3 is a bust.

The latter was more-or-less already true before 2007 started. The former... It's too early to tell, never underestimate the power of marketing dweebs at selling crap.

Implantable Contact Lenses Synthetic corneas will be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, allowing the shortsighted to have artificial contact lenses transplanted right into their eyes. No more popping out!

Not really a surprise or news. I thought it had already been done, but I guess I could be wrong. Not like it'd be the first time.

No More Dads Artificial gametes made from female eggs are sold over the internet, making fathers biologically irrelevant.

Still 5+ years off. Also it's not really an online type thing until they get a USB medicomaitc or something like that. It's still going to require the wom(an|en) in question to go to a lab and/or doctors office.

PaedoSpace Sex offenders start their own social networking service. It's popular on Capitol Hill.

That's hardly insightful or news. Already done, it's called congress.

DNA Database for Athletes To stamp out doping, the Olympic Committee orders all athletes to submit DNA samples to a global database, which matches blood found in doping forensics to cheats. Forensics include needles, tubes, bags of blood and skin cells on stacks of 100-euro notes seized at doping clinics.

Got bridge? Want one? This won't happen.

Online Sitcom Picked Up by Network Encouraged by the news, the internet becomes home to 5,000 clones of Friends, shot by friends using their friends but unwatched even by their friends.

Wired, meet youtube, youtube meet wired.

MySpace Spaces Out MySpace splinters as teens head for niche sites. New services that control profiles across multiple social networking sites begin to take off.

Possible, but I doubt it. Most people are too lazy to move.

Only IM at work -- NOT

[PeeAitchPee]

Spam Doubles: No-brainer -- but no one cares because we're all using IM, especially at work.

Sorry, wrong, *buzzz*. Email will continue to be the corporate IT bedrock it's been for the last decade. While IM is great for those young folks with a short attention spam pushing around uber-important stuff like "OMG?!?!? He dumped her? Shes gonna like be sooooo drunk tonite!" -- and I'll admit it even has a place augmenting email in certain areas of the enterprise -- corporate america already has billions in infrastructure built around this more persistant method of communication. I for one have noticed that if I leave "on" an IM client at work I get pestered to the point where I just end up keeping it off, and eventually unstall it.

Re:Apple laptops?

[Keyslapper]

Actually, I'd be surprised if it was only 20%.

I'm not an OS hound at all, I've used Linux, FreeBSD, Windows (Every version since 3.1 - except '98) and finally, MacOSX. FreeBSD has always been a favorite, and I've always lamented the fact that there weren't more paying jobs that focused on the *BSDs.

I've developed (for my bread and butter) on 5 flavors of Unix (not including Linux or any *BSD), and am currently doing so on Windows.

Now, that doesn't make me an expert on any one of these platforms, and certainly doesn't make me privy to any special information, but it seems to me that the changes Apple has made in just the last couple years are huge gains. You can now do anything with MacOSX that you could once only do on Windows - and a great many of them are considerably easier with OSX.

The change to an Intel architecture has opened the way to VM development, which essentially puts Apple ahead of MS in terms of feature availability - while MS has added video and photo management features to Vista that are suspiciously similar to iPhoto and iDVD, they still don't have anything like GarageBand or Sherlock (which, by the way, is an AWESOME app). This is the point where MS will start to lose, unless they stop playing the "Me Too" game, using Apple as their R&D lab and start playing to their strengths. MS is still ahead in the hardware game, though with Apple's shift to Intel, this is a somewhat slimmer lead. Vista has been labeled a MacOSX wannabe (without the stability) by a number of sources, some of which are typically pro-MS. MS needs to get their own R&D and design teams, and start making their UI more flexible - and stable. Until they start focusing on flexibility, stability, and (more effectively) on security, they'll continue to struggle to stay just one step ahead.

I think this will be the year the balance starts to tip. I don't know if it will stay tipped, or if it will tip to anything near equivalence, much less anywhere near the level Apple actually deserves for all their hard work and creative innovation, but it will tip.

And BTW, I've been waiting for the new year myself to upgrade to a Macbook Pro, simply for the "extras" that Apple does so much better, and the VMs, which will finally let me have the OS of my choice on a laptop. Of course, storage for all these VMs will now become something of a hassle (WinXP, Vista, Ubuntu, Knoppix, FreeBSD, etc.) ...

Before anyone suggests you can still get those OSes on a VM in Windows, keep in mind, you can't get MacOSX on a VM in Windows yet. Even so, I happen to like the look and feel of the Apple notebooks better than pretty much anything I've seen from Dell, Gateway, or any of the other big PC makers.

Re:Apple laptops?

[Gr8Apes]

Actually, I prefer the MacBook (Pro) w/ windows combination, especially if you do any dev at all that also runs on Unix. Can't count the number of times that capitalization has caused issues when transferring to a real OS. (That's right, Windows still sucks eggs in that dept.) With OSX and Parallels, you now get a real OS, and can run those few pesky windows apps seamlessly, at least until MS tries to break them again.

And why wouldn't you get a Mac? Price? For similarly robust computers, Macs are now very competitively priced. And the packaged software is pretty darn nice too, and is much more feature rich than the MS set, although not good enough to not require an additional software purchase for the serious user. (e.g., iPhoto is nice, until you get into RAW editing, or thousands of pictures. iMovie is nice, but for full menu creation, you'll need something better)

I'm looking forward to my Macbook Pro, it'll be on order within the week. The Macbook is nice, but I miss the backlit keys.

Re:interesting, not necessarily agreed...

[Achromatic1978]

Problem is, that's going to plateau. At some point they'll reach that point where to gain any inroads they have to start replacing all the corporate Dells, Compaqs and IBMs - then their growth will slow dramatically, "rightly" or "wrongly".

Re:Apple laptops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Less than 5% of computers on the internet are Macs (Check most website user-agent stats). For 20% of 50% of all computers sold to be Macs (ie: 10%) you'd need to double that statistic, fast. I highly doubt any company can do that sort of thing. Hell, even Pepsi couldn't do it when New Coke came out. Would be interesting to see it happen, it'd definitely make for something that would be discussed in Marketing and Economics classes for a long time (hell, probably forever).