It's time for a spot of bleary eyed crystal ball gazing.
Last year, my predictions were fairly reasonable with 7 hits covering the commercial release of PLED TVs to our beloved government economists saying that 2010 would be worse than expected.
The jury is still out on house prices [Update : the December 2009 figures showed the first annual increase in house prices - 2.5% - since May 2008.] whilst we await the land registry report but alas two of the predictions were wide of the mark. The FTSE 100 failed to drop below 3,500, only hitting 3, 512 - no cigar there then - and Yahoo wasn't sold.
So, with the usual added vagueness, looseness of terms and general get out clauses, yawn with delight for :-
Mystic Me Predictions for 2010.
- The number of mergers & acquisitions in the cloud computing and open source industries will reach fever pitch, surpassing previous years.
- The first examples of people trading on variability in cloud infrastructure prices and the early formation of brokerage concepts will appear.
- There will be no let-up in end user confusion surrounding cloud computing as would be thought leaders will embark on an orgy of term redefinition. Expect lots and lots of heated debates on how cloud isn't cloud computing isn't utility computing.
- The distorted creative destruction meme of modern society (i.e. "out with the old, in with the new") will get ahead of our desire to consume technology. Despite many predicting the death of the book, paperbacks will have a surprisingly good year.
- RPI in the UK will rise sharply and the FTSE 100 will drop below 3,000 during the year. Judging on past performance, the MPC will keep interest rates low because they're barking mad.
- Under howls of protest, banks will be given more taxpayers cash. This will be despite being bailed out, given free cash through quantitative easing and then splashing lots of dosh on bonuses. The tired arguments that "no-one saw this second crisis" coming and that we "can't let the banking system fail" will be trotted out to order.
- Despite independent estate agent surveys suggesting that house prices have risen a gazillion percent in the last minute, Land Registry house prices will continue to drop in the U.K.
- Environmental forecasters will be befuddled by Arctic summer ice disappearance exceeding the worst predictions of current climate models.
- There will be legal attempts to claim and quantify ownership of social networks as company IP.
- The new Doctor Who will be pants and the attempts to spice it up and make it more gritty will look rather sad.