noteworthy wrote:
The op-ed page of the LA Times solicited commentary from a full slate of futurist technology pundits who, as it turns out, have nothing but good things to say about the year ahead. The future is so bright, I've got to go buy some tech stocks! Most of them are plugging specific products or services; either that, or analysis has devolved into the old tired/wired dichotomy. Aside from the one-phrase bylines, there are no financial interest disclosures here. I thought those had become de rigueur in the business and financial press, but apparently not so for editorials.

Aside from Ballmer, none featured here are in the hardware business. None are in the infrastructure business. Is this a signal? Are we done there? What of Intel, AMD, Motorola, Broadcom, etc.?

I am especially struck by the pundits' more-of-the-same ideas; perhaps this is partly due to the too-near horizon established by the paper. Ballmer is spun up about policy-based ring-tones; what is that, like, a few hundred lines of code? Sherman is touting Second Life. Several are enamored of YouTube and the slow collapse of broadcast. Barry sees nothing but upside -- freedom! -- in having your entire life's "state" on a memory stick; not content to simply ignore the question of risk, he concludes that the lowest risk option is to carry your digital medical records, tax returns, and a lifetime of recorded communications (voice, video, text, other) in something that could drop from your pocket onto the city sidewalk without notice.

Where are the new applications, the new ideas? The "personal genomics kit" is tantalizing, but Brockman offers no explanation. You can find more here and here. I think people might be as much or more interested in a kit of the variety described by Freeman Dyson -- more of a "toy with consequences", along the lines of a high school chemistry set. (I note that there are as yet zero Google hits for that phrase.)

A few thoughts:

The Internet may start to experience some major growing pains in 2007. IPv6 has been stillborn, known routing problems remain unresolved, and the IPv4 address space is nearing its limits. From the consumer perspective, we are nearly at the end of end to end; by the end of 2007, we may see the start of a trend in which residential broadband Internet service ceases to include a public IP address. 2008 could bring the era of double- and triple-NATted networks.

Vista enhancements notwithstanding, and the industry alarmists put aside, Internet security is in a rather dismal state.

These "what's hot next year" articles always crack me up. Besides smacking of "this is just to sell more ads" and "I'm getting a free one of these next week for shilling it", they give no real insight. It's like asking someone what kind of sign is going to be posted at the intersection ahead.

I tend to like Bob Cringely's end of year column because he not only gives predictions that tend to be correct, but also examines the trends and motivations behind them.

There's definitely some key trends developing and their implications aren't too hard to model out. The idea of carrying your 'state' around with you is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a long time. Perhaps you can carry around your security token, or even your cookie, but good security hygene will be needed to make this just a component of an overall architecture that allows ubiquitous access to you data. The key trend though is not your access to your data, but the liquidity of that data in general. MANY stakeholders hold and need your data. Having a good structure for allowing granular access control to this data is needed, but the network is the container no matter what. You're seeing this moving quickly in health care and finance.

The line about contextual ring tones only being a few lines of code made me laugh out loud! =) That's so 2002 anyways Steve! Of course, he probably thinks that Vista is only 6 months behind too. But context is definitely a HUGE trend that is starting to swell. Context is not just GPS+Web 2.0, it's everything being 'aware' of what situation you're in right now. This can be as simple as automatically forwarding your cell phone to your VoIP home number when you walk in the house and sending it to vm after midnight during the week unless it's your mom calling, but this is literally the tip of the iceberg.

What will be most interesting will be those two trends combine, as it's a requirement to not only manage your rules for context, but those rules will be highly interdependent on lots of personal data.

Another HUGE trend is outcomes alignment. This is something that I've seen and worked with a lot in health care the last few years, but I think the concept will expand into a lot of other areas. It's the concept that doing X yields Y and you can prove it and incent people to follow that path. There's a lot of value chains which make people billions of dollars where this simple construct doesn't really exist or people are abusing it. I think that's going to start to disappear as people demand more transparency and accountability in their affairs. In some ways, this is linked into the Big Brother trend, where privacy is being traded for security, but it's unclear which one will influence the other.

RE: What will they think of next?