A few months ago, Shane, Kelvin and myself, along with Carl for a little bit, found ourselves in a bach on Waiheke island. It was lovely and sunny, the beach was about 100m away, so we stayed inside all day and talked about just about everything. And of course, predicted the future.
A quick summary of our predictions, so we can check these in 2014 (these are 5 year predictions).*EDIT* It should be pointed out that… we didn’t exactly agree on all of these. I’ve indicated the ownership and agreement/disagreement *EDIT*. In no particular order:
1. Obama gets 2nd term.
2. Stagflation period in the US, ie, recession coupled with inflation (Kelvin, I didn’t know what stagflation was…).
3. Digital camera market tanks, subsumed by cellphones.
4. PC Hard drive market vanishes, subsumed by flash memory (Shane partially disagrees, argues HDs will continue in big servers etc. Greg thinks big servers will also use flash memory to save power).
5. Android (or similar open platform) dominate mobile space (Kelvins, Greg disagrees)
6. Apple licenses Mobile Mac OS to drive people to ITunes (Gregs prediction)
7. Oil > $80/barrel
8. National second term, introduces a capital gains tax on property (Gregs, Shane disagrees).
9. Xero returns to market for funding in 2009 (looking like a pretty certain bet!). CORRECT.
10. One I forgot, Apple branded PCs have share of PC market > 20%!!! (Gregs, Kelvin disagrees and Shane 50/50)
11. Michael Jackson returns with a bigger album than Thriller (Ah, Kelvin. Greg and Shane…er… well… yes. That Kelvin…) As Shane said in comments, the odds of this one happening now are… slim.
The longer range forecast includes Shanes prediction of true machine intelligence within 20 years. It might be best to hope he is wrong about that!
9. Xero returns to market for funding in 2009.
I would have agreed with you 3 months ago.
But now I believe break-even is sub 14 months away and the recent current customer base growth has extended the runway…
10. Michael Jackson returns with a bigger album than Thriller
haha yeah right!
Well, bear in mind that we made these calls about 2 months ago, right before they started all the announcing of record sales! Dammit!
They are doing exceptionally well with the growth of the customer base, just having passed the 6000 paying customers mark. Now, thats a damn fine effort, and it may indeed stave off the necessity of heading back to the market, a move which would wreck their share price in the short term.
I guess everyone will be waiting for their may reporting date with baited breath. Waiting, while listening to Thriller 2, the next gigantic hit from the king of pop!
Bah I was incorrect! 2 days later!
Bring on Thriller 2 I guess!!!
Well, one correct prediction so far is a good start!
I don’t remember agreeing that National would put a property capital gain tax in place. That seems unlikely to me as it would piss off too many of their support base.
I would also water down “PC hard drive market vanishes”. I think it will still exist, but it will go from core PC component to an optional component. But yeah, essentially the consumer PC end of the market will tank.
Do we have prediction 2 true already? Inflation in the US is still positive:
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/CurrentInflation.asp
And GDP growth is negative. I think the official definition is 3 quarters of negative growth? We have had two so far and I guess the first 2009 quarterly results will appear soon and will be also negative.
[...] of various technologies we decided to write our future predictions down. Greg has listed them here. Greg, we can tick prediction 9 off. Now I’m just waiting for Michael Jackson’s comeback [...]
Greg, with prediction 10, are you counting only Apple branded PCs or are you also counting any PC running the Mac OS? If it is the former, then I think the prediction may need a “(Greg’s prediction)” following it. The major points of difference we had in making the predictions seemed to center around the future dominance of Apple. I believe that Apple’s strength is also its weakness. By building closed products without any requirements for interoperability, they are able to use small iterative design steps to produce products with consistent design. However, by being closed and failing to leverage the possibilities that interoperating with other future products brings, is Apple’s weakness. That is the basis for my belief that Android or some other open system will become dominant over Apple’s iPhone. It is also the basis that I question prediction 10 that over 20% of future PCs will be Apple branded.
I’ve updated the predictions to indicate a bit more who thought what.
re: Apple, I think Apples strength is… well, Apples strength. I’ve realised that I’m a lazy consumer, and I don’t actually see a whole heap of advantage with the world of choice that springs from an open platform. I suspect laziness will rule!
re: Hard drives, I was reading computerworld today, and theres an article that headlines “Sun says future of servers is in SSDs”. Now, a more interesting article might be “Does Sun even have a future”, but the article basically said Sun will use SSDs to reduce power consumption and increase performance, because they can be located closer to CPUs. So perhaps server farms will move to SSDs, primarily because of the lower power consumption…
Oil is already over $70 a barrel… which rases a question: are we predicting that oil will be over $80 a barrel in 2014, or at we predicting that this will happen sometime before or during 2014?
Oil prices are amazing. Compared to a year ago they have halved. Compared to six months ago they have doubled! Now that’s crazy.
I thought I had a prediction saying that people would have games steamed to their homes via their internet connection. I.e., no machine at home, just a controller and display with the servers existing at some central location. It must have been an idea I emailed to you guys last year but we didn’t put on the list. Anyway, I just read that people are busy trying to do this:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/31331241
Oil has been crazy. Its dropping again because everyone seems to be swimming in oil. Not sure Id be speculating on oil right now.
That streaming game technology looks cool. Im not quite sure how well it will work out, since it must be dependent on bandwidth and latency.
But it definitely links to the concept of localised clouds which I think you mentioned at Waiheke, and I think will be the natural progression of cloud computing.
not sure if this will be the driver of localised clouds, but cloud computing in general will hit some sort of performance issue sooner or later.
Michael Jackson just shot to #1 on the UK charts with his greatest hits album. Thriller still looks safe at the #1 all time spot however
Number 2:
The US has had a recession since Q4 2008 so we got that part right. Maybe slightly positive GDP growth now. What about inflation at the same time? Inflation was positive Q4 of 2008. Yay, stagflation, as we predicted. But… since then deflation rather than infaltion!
So… a very generous interpretation would say that we were right. But, by a “period of stagflation” I think we all had more than a quarter in mind. True? Thus, overall, I’d say we got this one wrong… but we weren’t too far off.
Number 11:
With MJ dead I think we can close this one
I don’t think we can conclude that the stagflation prediction has been successful. I’ve investigated the Wikipedia definition of stagflation: “Stagflation is an economic situation in which inflation and economic stagnation occur simultaneously and remain unchecked for a significant period of time.” I assume that the transitory inflation along with the recession isn’t “a significant period of time”. My original thoughts were that if the US economy was shrinking while they also had inflation, then the Federal Reserve would be more likely to worry about stimulating the economy instead of controlling the inflation, and that this would over time resolve the housing bubble problem as worldwide over-priced houses will be inflated away. I still hold that this prediction could eventuate, with the foundations for it building up currently.
On number 11, I note that the album ‘This Is It’ is currently number one in the charts. See the following article: Michael Jackson hits number one with ‘This Is It. The prediction was just that Michael Jackson would return with an album bigger than Thriller. It was never stated that this required him to still be alive. I think this prediction is still in play
Yes, I thought the period of stagflation would be more pronounced. I think I recall when Kelvin originally proposed a stagflation period, he was predicting that Chinese demands for commodities (especially oil) would increase inflation. Not sure we have seen too much evidence of that. Still, we have 4.5 years to go!