As usual, we’ll start the new year by reviewing the predictions we made for the previous year. After our surprisingly accurate 2005 predictions, we decided to take more risks having more 2006 predictions, and making them more specific. The results, as we’ll see, were … predictable.
Here now, our 2006 predictions, in italics, with hindsight in ordinary type.
(1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly.
We predict this every year, and it’s always right. This prediction is so obvious that it’s almost unfair to count it.
Verdict: Right.
(2) The RIAA will quietly reduce the number of lawsuits it files against end users.
Verdict: Right.
(3) Copyright owners, realizing that their legal victory over Grokster didn’t solve the P2P problem, will switch back to technical attacks on P2P systems.
They did realize the Grokster case didn’t solve their problem; but they didn’t really emphasize technical countermeasures. They didn’t seem to have a coherent anti-P2P strategy.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(4) Watermarking-based DRM will make an abortive comeback, but will still be fundamentally infeasible.
The comeback was limited to the now-dead analog hole bill, which backed the dead-on-arrival CGMS-A + VEIL technology. Watermarking still looks infeasible for copy protection.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(5) Frustrated with Apple’s market power, the music industry will try to cozy up to Microsoft. Afraid of Microsoft’s market power, the movie industry will try to cozy up to Washington.
The music industry was indeed frustrated by Apple’s market power. But they drove a hard bargain with Microsoft, shackling Zune’s most interesting features. The movie industry did cozy up to Washington, but no more than usual, and probably not due to Microsoft-fear.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(6) The Google Book Search case will settle. Months later, everybody will wonder what all the fuss was about.
No settlement, but excitement about the Book Search case has definitely waned.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(7) A major security and/or privacy vulnerability will be found in at least one more major DRM system.
Verdict: wrong.
(8) Copyright issues will still be stalemated in Congress.
Another easy one.
Verdict: right.
(9) Arguments based on national competitiveness in technology will have increasing power in Washington policy debates.
This didn’t happen. We thought the election would make economic health more salient; but the election focus was elsewhere.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(10) Planned incompatibility will join planned obsolescence in the lexicon of industry critics.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(11) There will be broad consensus on the the need for patent reform, but very little consensus on what reform means.
The main policy division, predictably, was between the infotech and biotech sectors.
Verdict: right.
(12) Attention will shift back to the desktop security problem, and to the role of botnets as a tool of cybercrime.
This should have happened, but commentators mostly missed the growing importance of this issue. Botnets were implicated in the spam renaissance.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(13) It will become trendy to say that the Internet is broken and needs to be redesigned. This meme will be especially popular with those recommending bad public policies.
This trend mostly didn’t materialize, though there were wisps of this argument in the net neutrality debate.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(14) The walls of wireless providers’ “walled gardens” will get increasingly leaky. Providers will eye each other, wondering who will be the first to open their network.
Verdict: mostly right.
(15) Push technology (remember PointCast and the Windows Active Desktop?) will return, this time with multimedia, and probably on portable devices. People won’t like it any better than they did before.
Push tried to bring the TV model to the Net, so it seemed logical that as TV moved onto the Net it would become more push-like. But this didn’t happen, at least not yet.
Verdict: wrong.
(16) Broadcasters will move toward Internet simulcasting of free TV channels. Other efforts to distribute authorized video over the net will disappoint.
Verdict: mostly right.
(17) HD-DVD and Blu-ray, touted as the second coming of the DVD, will look increasingly like the second coming of the Laserdisc.
The jury is still out, but this prediction is looking good so far.
Verdict: mostly right.
(18) “Digital home” products will founder because companies aren’t willing to give customers what they really want, or don’t know what customers really want.
Outside of promotional efforts in the trade press, we didn’t hear much about the digital home.
Verdict: mostly right.
(19) A name-brand database vendor will go bust, unable to compete against open source.
Verdict: wrong.
(20) Two more significant desktop apps will move to an Ajax/server-based design (as email did in moving toward Gmail). Office will not be one of them.
There seemed to be a trend in this direction, but I can’t point to two major apps that moved. But Google did introduce Office-like products in this category.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(21) Technologies that frustrate discrimination between different types of network traffic will grow in popularity, backed partly by application service providers like Google and Yahoo.
These technologies didn’t develop, perhaps because of the policy stalemate over net neutrality.
Verdict: wrong.
(22) Social networking services will morph into something actually useful.
This one is hard to categorize. The meaning of “social networking” changed during 2006; it now refers to sites like MySpace and Facebook that are primarily webpage hosting services. That’s a useful and popular function; but it’s the term rather than the technology that morphed.
Verdict: mostly right (I guess).
(23) There will be a felony conviction in the U.S. for a crime committed entirely in a virtual world.
Commenters noted at the time that this prediction was poorly specified. Which didn’t matter, because it was wrong no matter how you interpret it.
Verdict: wrong.
Overall scorecard for 2006 predictions: four right, five mostly right, nine mostly wrong, five wrong. That’s more wrong than right, by a narrow margin, showing that our risk-taking strategy worked.
Stay tuned for our 2007 predictions.
