My 2006 predictions outcome

2006 is almost gone so now it might be a good time to take a look at how accurate my own predictions have been - and maybe in a future post I might also take a look at predictions from some other sites :)

I had five technical and five non-technical predictions for 2006:


1. MS Vista will be late and both Vista and OSX 86 will fail to meet expectations.

Well, Vista was late and normal end-users will only get it in 2007. OSX86 was just OSX recompiled, Apple has not even reached the 4% mark and Leopard will not be seen at least until the start of 2007. But the certain sign of failing to generate real interest is that in the torrent world there is a full OSX86 patched disk that can be directly installed on most higher-end 'beige-box PCs' - yet somehow almost nobody was actually interested ...


2. Apple will seriously lose market share in the MP3 segment and will probably have a few other flops; but it will survive - too many people want to feel "different" :)

This might be my 'least clear' prediction - in absolute percentage points it was true, and also the fact that Samsung had the best USB-stick MP3 player (YP-U2), SanDisk the best flash-based miniplayers (Sansa e2xx series) , Archos does have better video-and-MP3-players and Microsoft has launched a player with some wireless features (Zune, of course) yet somehow Apple still is the main seller of MP3 players just shows that people can be quite dumb in their quest for 'coolness' :)


3. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray will be late and will be "almost flops" in 2006.

100% true - I don't feel the need to comment too much on that - maybe just the observation that Sony somehow managed to be even worse than I expected :)


4. Blogging and podcasting will stagnate and most people will realize that there is a HUGE amount of noise (and more and more spam).

True again. And funny that 'podcasting' is a name claimed now by Apple, so remaining people will have to call themselves 'netcasters' :) It is also sad to note that spam email is now on the rise and that many new blogs are now mostly 'content spam' that even reach places like reddit and digg.


5. P2P might see a new rise - and that might also bring a big change for Google.

More traditional P2P was not so 'hot' BUT:
5a) torrents probably make up more than 50% of the internet traffic;
5b) places like reddit or digg were so hot that netscape.net was relaunched;
- so overall that was also true (even if Google so far did nothing).


Non-technical:

6. There will be at least one MAJOR terrorist attack.

That would be a rather wrong prediction - except for the fact that over 650000 people probably died in Iraq :(


7. Economy will stagnate in US and certain surprises might come on the currency market.

True, but it seems most people expected it so it was no huge surprise so far...


8. New, even bigger scandals and flops will be revealed around the Bush family and the republican party.

Well, the republican party lost both the House and the Senate ... and Bush reached the lowest approval ratings ever ... lower than Nixon ...



9. Oil will rise to new record levels.

True, but the election cycle and some anti-speculative measures slowed that down a little.


10. Civil liberties will continue to be eroded :(

Again - sad but true :(


Overall around or over 90% true - but since most predictions were rather generic I guess it might not be so impressive as some of the 'experts' with about 20-40% hit rate but which after enough years will hit something big by accident or simply by the power of statistics (see Dvorak, Cringeley and so on).