Jan 4, 2009
Here are my predictions for 2009, focusing on the tech world of course. Since I don’t recall being wrong before (though my selective memory might have something to do with that), I think we can all expect a predictable 09, stemming from this list.
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Twitter will continue to grow, but still fail to reach the mainstream. I just can’t picture twitter blossoming into a full fledged competitor of myspace of facebook, despite how much I wish it could. Instead I think it will find an existence working with those sites, but never challenging for real control.
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Apple will be really forcing Phil Schiller on the media. The lack of S.Jobs at MacWorld is the first sign of them trying to put a new face for the head of the company. If Steve decides to retire, the board doesn’t want the stock tanking 15% in one day.
EDIT: it seems that S.Jobs is not talking due to health and family reasons, but I still believe Apple will be using this strategy throughout the year.
- This one is more of a prayer then prediction, but Yahoo finds their identity. Lets face it, Yahoo doesn’t know what they’re good at, its not search thats for sure. In fact Yahoo is not particularly good at anyone thing, but they do have great applications and services (along side a majority of terrible ones). They need to trim the fat, focus on providing good services that generate page views.
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Facebook will pass myspace (though they may have already in that case facebook will continue to stomp on myspace), because myspace sucks and facebook is just above the line of suckage. There is a reason that facebook grew so fast in the beginning, people realized how much myspace sucks. Unless myspace can really turn their music playing into a successful attraction, they will start falling from their peak.
- Microsoft decides to focus on what they already know (yes, another prayer). But come on, they have been leading the office suite technology suite for so long, is it really possible that they would fail when adapting it to the web?
- Startups rediscover the business model. This one will be very interesting, startups are going to realize that investors are wanting income statements and cash flow statements that don’t end in a giant ZERO. I’m actually not very excited to see what new services come in 09, but how the startups convince customers to depart their thinner wallets.
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Posterous and Tumblr starting fighting the bigger platforms for the domination of the blogging world. The only thing stopping them right now, is the lack of integration with other online technologies (ie. problems with Technorati), preventing individual blogs from becoming more viral.
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Seesmic dies, this site has zero use and as much as I like the charisma of the CEO I cannot stand this site. Video comments are annoying and already exist in the form of replies on YouTube. Why bother making a whole new site when YouTube already has a giant database of videos at their disposal.
A side note for seesmic: DON’T HAVE YOU WHOLE SITE IN FLASH, ITS ALMOST AS ANNOYING AS PEOPLE TYPING IN ALL CAPS. GET WHAT I MEAN?!?!?
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Mahalo Answers goes big, because its useful, efficient and makes sense. I’m still not sold on the rest of mahalo, which probably has something to do with me hating their actual site and how it feels so “thrown together”, but this answers portion will be big and really put a hurt on Yahoo Answers.
- And for my final prediction….. are you as excited as I am? Well here it is, Google will continues to invest in companies at Eric Schmidt’s discretion. Many of their investments (not acquisitions) have absolutely nothing to do with Google’s core business, and seem to be based entirely on personal interests (ie. thermal energy). So expect this to grow in 2009 as Google cuts back on other services and realizes it has more engineers that it actually needs.
Thank you for reading my list, I hope you enjoy it.
BONUS PREDICTION:
Linux finally goes mainstream…. haha no it doesn’t. (Thanks to 1938media.com for this one)
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