2004 predictions: Recap

With the end of the year upon us, it’s time to do a quick san­ity check on how well I did on last year’s pre­dic­tions.

Apple

Scored well on the intro­duc­tion of the Apple mini, which rep­re­sents Apple’s entry into the lower end mar­ket. How­ever, no video iPod this year, only a photo one, leav­ing Apple far, far, away from the movie down­load­ing world.

On the com­puter end, Apple did not intro­duce a G5 portable. Wish­ful think­ing on my part, true, and still a wish I hope to see ful­filled in 2005.

Con­ver­gence: Music Stores

As expected, Apple has solid­i­fied its rela­tion­ship with AOL, offer­ing the iTunes store under an AOL login. How­ever, the store is not fully inte­grated within the AOL service.

As pre­dicted, the world of online music is now divided into two camps: AAC and Win­dows Media. How­ever, the sur­pris­ing move was from Real Net­works, which was the first com­pany beyond Apple to adopt the AAC format.

Con­ver­gence: Voice Over IP

As pre­dicted, voice over IP has had tremen­dous growth in 2004. AT&T’s exit from the con­sumer mar­ket can be seen as a move to reor­ga­nize around land-line offer­ings. Also of sig­nif­i­cance this year was the intro­duc­tion of VoIP ser­vices from most of the big telco player.

Reg­u­la­tory dis­cus­sions are now explod­ing, with tel­cos push­ing for dereg­u­la­tion as “a way to com­pete” against the new play­ers in the field. At the same time, the same tra­di­tional com­pa­nies are push­ing for reg­u­la­tion of VoIP businesses.

Wire­less: Wi-Fi phones

Dead wrong on that one. Maybe next year!

While WiFi con­tin­ues to progress at high speed, the intro­duc­tion of phone ser­vices using such ser­vice is limited.

Busi­ness: Revenge of the Inter­net companies

Google did its IPO as expected and that went very well. Other Inter­net com­pa­nies also went pub­lic this year but one can hardly talk of coat­tail effect.

On the bright side for investors, my pre­dic­tions about the decline in stock prices for the big play­ers did not pan out. How­ever, I still main­tain that the stock prices of com­pa­nies like Ebay, yahoo, and ama­zon are too high.

Busi­ness; Sun in Trouble

As expected, SUN con­tin­ues to have trou­ble finan­cially but I have to admit I was wrong in terms of what I expected them to do. They are still in the SPARC busi­ness and are still push­ing Solaris as their main OS.

Devel­op­ment: Stan­dards at the forefront

This one was an easy one. As sites like ESPN and Wired moved to new stan­dard for­mats, more and more peo­ple and com­pa­nies are get­ting inter­ested in more stan­dard com­pli­ant code. Not a head­line grab­ber but def­i­nitely a strong move.

Soci­ety: Social Net­works at the core

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Social net­works were slowly mov­ing but not really get­ting more impor­tant this year. Their inte­gra­tion with search could, how­ever, yield great potentials.

Pol­i­tics: Inter­net comes of age

The Inter­net did come of age in this elec­tion cycle but Howard Dean did not win the demo­c­ra­tic can­di­dacy. How­ever he, and other groups, man­aged to use the Inter­net to mobi­lize mil­lions of peo­ple. The Repub­li­cans, on the other side, used the power of con­ser­v­a­tive blog­gers to attack can­di­dates (for exam­ple, the Swift­boat vet­er­ans for truth) and then take on the estab­lish­ment (Dan Rather and Memogate).

Com­ing Soon: My pre­dic­tions for 2005!