Silicon Insider: The Next Great Tech Year ... 2009

Jan. 11, 2008 — -- If you are going to make predictions about the coming year in tech, it's always best to wait until after the first couple weeks of January. That's because the most important news -- at least in consumer electronics -- comes right after the first of the year at the Consumer Electronics Show and MacWorld.

If you read this column last week, you got my macro-predictions for 2008 in tech, notably:

A recession this year that has already begun, that is likely to be longer, but shallower, than I thought a few months ago. I noticed that a few days later the economist at Goldman came out and said the same thing.

A perceived stumble by Apple -- that is, the company just won't be able to maintain the incredible streak of brilliant new products and services it has enjoyed for the last few years. I also suggested that Apple would have a tough time this year fighting a three-front war (computers, phones and music/video) against some very large and very angry competitors in each market. For that I got the usual ad hominem attacks (there's nothing like being called a "hack" by some post-adolescent working at a Web site devoted to the worship of Apple products -- look in the mirror, son).

And next week's MacWorld may prove me wrong and Apple will announce the next "Jesus" product (as the iPhone was nicknamed). But I doubt it. Beyond a few interesting upgrades -- and one interesting long-shot: a "touch" computer featuring the iPhone interface -- it seems less and less likely that this will happen. And that means that Apple will largely have to go with what it's got and compete on price and distribution -- not its greatest strengths.

A major stumble by Google -- even my friends don't agree with me on this one, calling Google bulletproof. Maybe, but start keeping track of all of the senior executives leaving the company. It could be because they're so rich they don't need the hassle anymore … but it could also be because they know trouble is coming.

Recession-Busters Out There?

OK, those are the big ones. But what about actual devices -- the kinds of products, like the Nintendo Wii, that can buoy an entire industry (even an entire economy) out of recession? Is there anything we can see coming right now that will spare us the recession in tech? And if not, can we at least get a glimpse of the hot products of 2009 that will lead us into the next boom.

No. And Yes.

That's what CES is for. Back in my misspent youth, when I was a corporate PR guy, I used to beg product managers not to introduce their latest and greatest products (or more often, product prototypes) at CES. There's too much noise, I'd tell them, too many companies fighting for attention, too many over-crowded "CES special" trade magazine issues, too much hype. Wait until the weeks after CES, I'd tell them, when people are listening, when the magazines are empty and looking for copy, and when your product can stand alone instead of being buried in a list of "20 Interesting New Products"

But managers never listened, because CES was not about pitching their products to customers, but about strutting their success in front of their peers. And so, every year, there would be a traffic jam of new products queued up to be shown first at CES. And every year, beginning in 1980 when I became a newspaperman, I had to troop down to Vegas CES (then Semicon, then CES again) and write my own dreary "20 Interesting Products" list.

What the Reporters Are Saying

As you can probably tell, I basically hate CES, and if I could arrange to never attend again, I'd do so in a heartbeat. And I may never have to, as a number of reporters I know and respect are kind of enough to attend and report back for the rest of us.

This year, it was Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, David Pogue of the New York Times, and Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury-News -- all of them good guys and real pros. They were kind enough to go to CES, eat the bad food, endure the noise, hooker fliers and pushy PR flacks, and take a bullet for other journalists by filing stories the rest of us can analyze.

Having now read their stories and blog entries, it's hard not to notice that all three of these distinguished journalists had to push themselves a little extra hard to wax enthusiastic about much of anything they saw. Been there, done that. And this year it must have been especially tough to get excited about leopard skin tasers, "green" computing and music dial tones. I can understand why Glenn was reduced to photographing pretty girls and bad rock bands, and Dean interviewed Panasonic's CEO about his college days at San Jose State.

Still, it is possible to pick through the endless digital dross to pick out a few interesting gems that might be the hot consumer products not of 2008, but later down the road, because most won't be shippable this year, and among those that are, nearly all are waiting for Moore's Law to make them affordable to a mass audience.

Here are the ones that caught my eye:

Supersize: Panasonic showed off a wall-sized 150-inch plasma television. That's a lot of television, probably more than most of us are prepared for. But as in computing, whenever a new breakthrough occurs at the top -- i.e., supercomputers -- it eventually filters down to the bottom (PCs). The arrival of these super-TVs will not only put tremendous price pressure on smaller plasma and LCD flat screen TVs, but slowly acculturate us to the idea of televisions as not just a discrete, stand-alone experience, but as an experience fully integrated into our home environment (just try not to think about "Fahrenheit 451"). I have a feeling that just as large flat screens were the hot product last year once they approached the $1,000 threshold, superscreens will be a big deal in 2009 or 2010, depending on how fast the price drops.

Superthin: According to Pogue, the Sony XEL-1 was the hit of the show. It's an 11-inch TV that is an astounding 3 millimeters thick. That's about the thickness of a hardback book cover. More than that, the OLED screen is supposed to be spectacular, with incredible colors and contrast ratio. Unfortunately, the XEL-1 is currently $2,500 -- good for early adopters, but not for the rest of us. Give it 18 months, though, and you're looking at half the price (and bigger screens). It seems to me that this technology is almost infinite in appeal and nearly limitless in applications, many of which we haven't even thought of. We're all going to be buying OLED superthin TVs in 2010.

Superlife: This is another Pogue find. Panasonic showed off a $200 portable DVD player with 13 hours of battery life. That's a half-dozen movies, or an entire season of The Office. And all in a case not much thicker or heavier than current portable players. This is interesting enough, but it points to a larger trend. As I've written before in this column and elsewhere, the single most limiting factor in tech these days (as well as automotive) is batteries. When you consider the colossal, indeed world historic, advances in semiconductors, memory and display technologies over the last four decades, improvements in energy storage during that same era have been shockingly slow.

But this year, all of that may change. Indeed, with the incredible breakthroughs using nanotube batteries coming out of Stanford, the arrival of the Tesla sports car, and products like this new Panasonic DVD player, 2008 may just prove to be the year of the battery … and 2009 the year we incorporate those new superbatteries into our lives.

So, 2008 in Tech? Meh. But 2009 … Yeah.

Let's just get through this natural down cycle, purge out all of the deadwood and get ready for the next boom. The great new products have yet to appear, but in the meantime we can console ourselves that the new era of very thin and very big displays, as well as the long-awaited jump of batteries onto the Moore's Law rocket all-but guarantees that the next boom is going to be exciting indeed.

This work is the opinion of the columnist, and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News, as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNEWS.com Silicon Insider columnist since 2000.