Predictions That Flopped in 2003

Dec. 22 -- Mixed in with the traditional New York holiday scents of burnt chestnuts and overheated pretzels is the faint smell of a tech industry recovery.

Many predicted this slow road to wellness, but the track record on technology predictions in 2002 for the soon-to-depart 2003 was just as spotty as ever. Here is my second annual random review of technology predictions for this year.

Following a year littered with the corpses of failed dot-coms, tech companies and high-tech hopes, 2003 predictions from pundits big and small seemed to gather at the poles of ultra-cautious and fantastic. The reality was more of a fastball down the middle with a little spin at the end.

The Aberdeen Group did a remarkably good job of predicting the big tech issues of 2003: spam, identity theft, and e-mail security. But Aberdeen, like many others, missed the growing problem that content piracy would become and the proactive RIAA stance (like using IP information to prosecute alleged pirates), and the Motion Picture Association of America's anti-piracy campaign.

Former InfoWorld columnist and current PBS tech personality Robert X. Cringely made some interesting predictions last year.

Half-Right Prophesies

He was not alone in opining that HP/Compaq would continue "its long slide into oblivion." I heard similar comments from many of my tech-savvy friends. However, HP spent the past year diversifying and shipping industry leading products like its Media Center PCs and PDAs.

I will make a mini-prediction for 2004, though, and say that HP needs to wake up to the fact that any handheld that isn't also a phone and camera will be doomed next year.

Cringely, like others, saw Linux throwing Microsoft into panic resulting in reactive marketing. Some of that happened, but no one predicted the Linux community all but self-destructing thanks to infighting that turned litigious (SCO, IBM, the GPL — what a mess).

Microsoft's Palladium security initiative did, as Cringely sagely predicted, go away — sort of. It didn't die as much as become reborn under a new, unpronounceable name — NGSCB (Next-Generation Secure Computing Base). When Microsoft releases Longhorn sometime in 2005 or 2006, we'll see and hear much more about this somewhat complex trusted-computing solution.