8 Can't Miss Predictions... for 1998

alphadogg-nw writes "Tired of being wrong too often, a Network World pundit applies 20-20 hindsight to this list of prognostications for 1998, which if he's right will turn out to be quite a year. Among the forecasts: The U.S. Department of Justice will go medieval on Microsoft, Compaq will buy what's left of DEC, AOL likewise Netscape, Apple will introduce something said to look like an Easter egg ... and then there's the deafening buzz about this new search engine called Google."

Bad headline

[MSTCrow5429]

The headline is misleading. These aren't predictions for 1998, they're written by a guy in 2008 as if they were written in 1998. That's what the "hindsight" part means.

My prediction for 2008: Major worldwide recession, due to the massive inflationary bubble bursting, an inability of the central banks to continue using inflation to create a false sense of prosperity, and stagflation.

Re:Wow! That was easy.

[root_42]

> My predictions for 1988: ...
> 9. Liquid crystal will be discovered by Frederick Reintzer.

According to Wikipedia [1] that happened in 1888.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystals#History [wikipedia.org]

Just a second there

[Bandman]

http://labs.google.com [google.com]

Re:Altavista

[Ours]

It's Spanish:
Alta = something high
Vista = view
Translated to "high-view" and from my understanding it's some place in California.

Re:Digg?

[cHiphead]

I "switched" to digg for about 2 months before it got excessively annoying. Ever since the interface change I've been 99% slashdot for comments, no more wasting my time on digg comments system, their useless trolls are nowhere near as entertaining as /.'s.

Cheers.

Re:Wow!

[egomaniac]

I thought USB was popular prior to the iMac. If I remember correctly, it was Firewire that they helped bring to the forefront.

Nope, it was USB. Everybody on the Windows side of things was still using the legacy ports, it was hard to find USB peripherals and they were buggy. The iMac's popularity forced manufacturers to add decent USB support to their devices. Printers went parallel + USB, mice switched over to USB w/ PS/2 adapters, etc. Plus everything was available in your choice of five translucent colors.

And the damned legacy adapters still won't die over on the PC side of things. Most KVM switches, for example, still only support PS/2 connectors, and I had to buy a USB-to-DB9 connector to be able to program my universal remote control. Love Apple or hate 'em, you've got to admit that they're good at getting people to drop the old broken standards and move forward. We need to put them in charge of getting the US over to metric.

Re:Altavista

[SharpFang]

Unfortunately, no, by the end, not.

I stayed with Altavista quite long. I tried Google once, soon after it emerged, didn't feel impressed and went back to Altavista. And for the time, It Was Good.

I kept using it for another 2 or 3 years and saw it go down the drain.

First, they fell victim to spammers. People figured out how to position their sites with it, and any somewhat common keyword yielded many pages of commercial junk before you could get to content, and first 10 or so positions for mostly -any- keyword were occupied by spam links.

Then they started adding ads. Sponsored links replacing first search results, some obnoxious popups, really bad junk. Remember these were times before Adblock. It was utter junk.

Then it stopped keeping up with progress. Sites took months to get indexed, and 404s even more to get removed. The results were a total junk.

I gave Google another chance and was hugely impressed. It was still before people figured out most of pagerank tricks and Google was almost totally spam-free. I had my results within first 3-4 links, not after 3-4 pages!

Red Queen was right: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

Re:Predictions for 2008

[wertarbyte]

Add to that: $7/gallon gasoline in the USA

Oh boy, stop crying: 7 (U.S. dollars / US gallon) = 1.2587328 Euros / liter

We are way past that in europe (approaching 1.5 EUR here in germany) for some time now. And guess what? Civilisation is not collapsing.

Re:Mod parent up

[Forge]

Actually what's wrong with taco's post is the icon.

This article should have had the "foot". Except that it was not that funny :(

PS: In a side note, this journalist (Paul McNamara) is probably just training to become a stock market annalist. A profession dominated by guys who make a living by "Predicting the past" with moderate accuracy.