It’s almost December, so I think it’s ok to begin the silliness. Here are five things that are 100% guaranteed to happen during 2007:
1. Meg Whitman leaves eBay.
2. Microsoft’s stock outperforms Google’s.
3. Oracle makes a major push into software-as-a-service for enterprise applications, buying up small providers and revamping its approach to software pricing.
4. A nonprofit, ad-free search engine is launched and, widely praised, quickly gains market share.
5. The blogosphere is roiled by a payola scandal.
And here’s a bonus, to make it an even half-dozen:
6. Dave Winer retires from the blogosphere, amid great fanfare, only to start blogging again two months later.
“A nonprofit, ad-free search engine is launched and, widely praised, quickly gains market share.”
“Widely praised”, I can see – it’s the sort of thing for which there is pent-up pundit love.
But “quickly gains market share”? Surely you jest. Unless you’re talking about from 0.001% to 0.002% being a 100% share increase. Or maybe dividing by zero giving infinity.
Even *Microsoft* is struggling to gain search market share!
Microsoft isn’t offering a better mousetrap.
I don’t see any evidence that “nonprofit, ad-free” are what users would consider a better mousetrap. Especially if it comes at a trade-off of “slow” (remember the huge infrastructure that modern search requires)
Ooh, that #6 is link-bait!
Even the most modest display of wit on the Internet can be characterized as “link bait.” I’ve come to realize that accusations of “trolling” or “link baiting” are often compliments in disguise. They mean you’ve succeeded in writing something worth reading.
Several of these “predictions” are unfalsifiable:
#1 is fairly easy to judge, and we’ll take #2 as comparing the percentage change in share prices.
#3 is very sketchy with respect to what constitutes a “major” push. If they buy up any small companies, but derive only a tiny tiny fraction of their revenue from “SaaS” (which needs a formal definition itself), then do you count as being right? It seems like a no-brainer that a company as big as Oracle will end up aquiring *someone* with SaaS in their marketing literature. Can which pick some percentage of revenues which would count as a “major” push by Oracle?
#4 is pretty vacuous: anything which is just launched gains market share. The question is whether such is at all significant to the incumbents like Google. How about an ad-free search engine which gets 2% of the search market? ’cause I’d bet against that.
#5 is again vacuous: the blogosphere’s is continuously roiled, and considers everything to be a scandal. It seems like any mention of payola would fulfill your prediction. Can we say that a top-20 blog drops out of the top-20 following a revelation that they were being paid for content, or is this too specific for you?
#6 needs definition of “retires”. Are you predicting that Dave Winer stops writing anything for two months straight? Or that he announces that he will never blog again?
Tough audience this year.
But isn’t “unfalsifiable” a desirable characteristic in a prediction?
The accuracy of #1 and #2 can be measured precisely. #3 through #5 are pretty easy to gauge as well, I’d say. You’ll know it if you see it. As for #6, Winer has already announced he plans to retire from blogging. The prediction is that he will carry out that plan and then, two months later, renege on it.
And, remember, no one ever checks these things anyway. A year from now, everyone will be too busy making new predictions, most of which, if they’re any good, won’t pan out.
I meant “falsifiable” in the logical sense. If a statement could not possibly be contradicted, then it is a tautology and offers no predictive power whatsoever. “Bill Gates will die next year, or he’ll survive” is a tautology.
You get credit for your predictions (from me, at least) based on both correctness and their predictive power.
For example, Bob Cringely has made a very specific prediction that Apple will release televisions (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060907_000969.html), and that they are definitely coming before the Christmas season (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060914_000970.html). Unlike most of his predictions (and the revisionist casting of his previous predictions in the second link), he gets props for the specificity. Accuracy, however, counts as well.
Very courageous predictions.
My predictions are quite chicken-hearded.
See my cartoon.
Bye,
Oliver
4. A nonprofit, ad-free search engine is launched and, widely praised, quickly gains market share.
This puzzles me. I believe that the web is firmly in the hands of a new merchant class, making everything expensive, complicated and competitive. Without funding, #4 is not possible — and who would fund such a thing?
To me, #4 represents the myth of web 2.0: ‘innocent start-up breaks out into worldwide phenomenon.’ Feh. My predition is that this PR-motivated myth will finally fall out of fashion. Okay — that’s just wishful thinking.
I’m all for the new merchant class and techno-utopia (sure, why not), but techno-utopian duplicity is nauseating.
Sid – as a marginal phenomenon the techno-utopian myth is self-sustaining: there are enough people who believe it’s a reality to make it a reality, or at least a small element of their reality. (I’ve been using Firefox since I switched from Opera – how about you?)
I think what Nick’s talking about in #4 is an awareness that Google and Yahoo! aren’t on the techno-utopian side of the fence: they’re enormously wealthy companies whose products we use every day, thus making them even wealthier. Not unlike Microsoft (and I’m old enough to remember when Bill was the cool young upstart).
If that awareness spreads (and it may not – it certainly hasn’t made much progress since last December) then a Firefox-like defection to an ad-free alternative could well take hold. At the margin, certainly – but it’s a noisy margin.
So nothing interesting is going to happen then ?
Seth, Sid, Phil,
My personal sense is that the quality of search results from the big engines has begun going down rather than up and that has opened up an opportunity for a new approach to web search. I don’t know what that approach would be (though I think it may involve searching less of the web rather than more), but I have a further sense that it may emerge from an academic institution or other nonprofit without a commercial motive. I think Brin and Page may have been onto something back in 1998 when they wrote, “it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.” That was, of course, before the techno-utopians entered the merchant class.
Nick
Nick, how is a “nonprofit, ad-free search engine” going to pay for the massive infastructure? It’s conceivable the European Union would do a search project, though I’m still very skeptical – is that what you had in mind?
I think the idea of a transparent search engine was killed by spam. It sounds good in theory, but let’s incorporate the experience of practice.
Note, regarding #6 – others are predicting it won’t happen at all
Phil- I do use firefox, and I agree about the myth.
All- Regarding search and profit, I wonder if the next revolution will be motivated by advertisers instead of users. Imagine being an advertiser and looking at Google, thinking: “they’re building a new empire with my money!” Maybe groups of advertisers will organize into negotiating blocs. Or maybe they’ll form their own online advertising network (perhaps as a co-op?). Maybe they would fund a New, Great Search Engine? … full of product placements, to be sure ;-)
Anyhow, Nick, I agree that indexing less could yield better search results. In other words: vertical search. Playing with this idea, I created a vertical search aggregator: foundd.com. It works on FF, IE and Opera, but not yet Safari — if it made money, I could afford time to work on it ;-)
how is a “nonprofit, ad-free search engine” going to pay for the massive infastructure?
Beats me, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Maybe I should have left it at “non-profit search engine” rather than “non-profit, ad-free search engine.” That would open up a lot more possibilities, as Sid notes. There’s also the possibility that, if less may be more, “massive” won’t be as massive as you think. Or how about some kind of p-to-p model like Skype or the CERN grid?
Or maybe Larry Page will quit Google and underwrite the whole thing.
One of my predictions last year was that Sarbanes Oxley would be repealed. A fellow blogger bet me a nice bottle of wine and with 29 days left looks like I will lose. (though the lobbying I have done on my blog, looks like it will be significantly diluted in 2007)
I want to recover that and would be willing to bet a similar bottle on 1 or 6. You game?
I predict that Rob is an ass. These predictions all seem perfectly falsifiable, in a common sense way.
Sorry to be so, you know, obnoxious about it, but overly clever opinions with nothing behind them kind of get my back up.
I like prediction five: “payola” has such a Top 40 and 1970’s connotation, it would be humorous if the term now came to be associated with ranking deceptions in the “new” web 2.0 world.
Could there be any money in being misleading about pageviews?
Oracle makes a major push into software-as-a-service for enterprise applications, buying up small providers and revamping its approach to software pricing.
It seems you are not aware that Oracle OnDemand already exists for the past few years. If you go to http://www.oracle.com/customers/services/outsourcing you will get more than 50 customer successes (of course there are many more).
Is it a backdated prediction destined to come true :-) ?
Ermm:
> It’s conceivable the European Union would do a search project, though I’m still very skeptical
Well, they *have*, it’s called Quaero, and not looking in good shape: it has proven too ambitious so far. It is possible that academics get upset by the corporate partners, and make something valuable out of it — though I doubt any forking can happen. Financing could be by indirect funding: an academic usage of the annonymized data, e.g.
Actually, they are several open-source, ad-free search engines. Most work thanks to volounteer subscription to a program similar to “seti@home”: they live they computer running, with the crawling done in the back; some people lend larger servers for coordination. For the moment, their are not willing to have a wider public using them, as they are afraid of the far most numerous free-riders there. But they exist.
Microsoft isn’t offering a better mousetrap.
This seems to suggest that the supposed new nonprofit search engine would gain significant market share just because it’s better. But since when is better necessarily the most popular?? (Of course, as noted by others, the value of this particular prediction depends largely on what you meant by “gains market share”.)