2005 Predictions: Keeping the Score

So it’s that time of the year. As is the case every year, I’m review­ing the pre­dic­tions I made last year and look­ing at the score.

Voice Over IP

The big sur­prise here was the acqui­si­tion game. When I made the pre­dic­tions last year, i thought that the acquir­ers would be larger tel­cos. How­ever, com­pa­nies like Ebay and Yahoo! have been play­ing the acqui­si­tion game, look­ing at tele­com space as a fea­ture to add to their prod­uct set.

It does, how­ever, show the rise of Euro­pean play­ers in the US tele­com mar­ket. Skype was clearly a Euro­pean player that was seen as a major player in the US mar­ket, which explains the acqui­si­tion by Ebay.

Aster­isk also expe­ri­enced a ban­ner year with deploy­ments increas­ing in the small and medium enter­prise mar­ket. It has not yet bro­ken into the large scale enter­prise mar­ket so I get only half points for this prediction.

Enter­tain­ment Convergence

The con­ver­gence I pre­dicted in the post is now in full swing. the intro­duc­tion of the Xbox 360 as a con­ver­gence device and the rise of the video iPod as a way to move tele­vi­sion into the arena of small con­sumer elec­tron­ics has tur­bocharged the space.

While MP3 has not yet become the stan­dard for mobile phone, it is start­ing to emerge. The dis­as­trous release of the Motorola ROCKR has prob­a­bly slowed progress in that area but I still con­tent that it will hap­pen in the future. Pass on this one.

Mean­while, the pre­dic­tion that the movie indus­try would start suing is start­ing to come true. They’ve started with a cam­paign try­ing to con­vince peo­ple of the evils of ille­gal down­load­ing. How­ever, the MPAA seems to have learned, to some extent, about the dis­as­trous effect of suing one’s cus­tomers and is being care­ful to not fol­low in the foot­steps of the RIAA.

Also as pre­dicted, legal down­load­ing of tele­vi­sion shows is hap­pen­ing. It came from an unex­pected source in the form of Apple, which is now tak­ing the for­mula it applied to music into the rest of the space.

The deci­sion by both XM and Sir­ius to offer a com­bined solu­tion that includes both Inter­net streams and satel­lite feeds in the same pack­age is fol­low­ing my pre­dic­tion that radio is about to be upended.

The rise of user-created con­tent is also one of the big sto­ries of 2005 and I believe it will con­tinue through 2006. While no star has bro­ken out of the pod­cast­ing and video­cast­ing world, I believe we’re on the cusp of see­ing this hap­pen. On the video end, I believe rock­et­boom will be the first star to break out. Their recent announce­ment of a part­ner­ship with Tivo is just the begin­ning. On the pod­cast end, the space is get­ting more com­pli­cated: the entry of the main­stream play­ers into the mar­ket could act as a buffer, keep­ing new play­ers away or at least pro­tect­ing the sta­tus quo.

Busi­ness

Large merg­ers did indeed take the fore­front in the 2005 year, how­ever none of the merg­ers I pre­dicted actu­ally hap­pened. A lot of money went into merger and acqui­si­tion bud­gets and has increased greatly in 2005.

Also impres­sive is the fact that many of the smaller play­ers were the tar­get of acqui­si­tion. It seems the new exit sce­nario for web 2.0 com­pa­nies is not to go the IPO route but to find a larger com­pany that will gob­ble you up.

Apple

This one is way off. Most of my pre­dic­tions were off base: Apple did intro­duce a video player, to crit­i­cal and con­sumer acclaim, and an iWork prod­uct suite, but they did not intro­duce any photo cam­era, a record­ing player, or a way to send images straight to print­ers. Their part­ner­ship with a phone com­pany (Motorola and the ROKR) was fairly dis­as­trous, show­ing the com­pany still prefers going at it alone than try­ing to part­ner up.

Devel­op­ment

Ser­vice ori­ented archi­tec­tures, trust and secu­rity did take to the fore­front this year. Mean­while weblogs and con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems have not merged yet. How­ever, more and more large com­pa­nies are start­ing to take a look at weblog soft­ware, with RSS become a major dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel. This trend will con­tinue to accel­er­ate into the new year.

Per­sonal

On the per­sonal front, I made a com­mit­ment to blog more often. While it looks like this com­mit­ment will not come true (I didn’t cre­ate more entries), it comes with a sub­stan­tial dis­claimer. This year, I tried to focus on longer, more ana­lyt­i­cal types of pieces. My deci­sion of doing it that way was largely due to a deci­sion to try to add to the over­all dis­cus­sion instead of rehash­ing what other peo­ple have been say­ing. The inter­est­ing thing is that this approach has actu­ally resulted in more read­er­ship. You don’t have to blog a lot to get peo­ple to read you; you just have to craft qual­ity blog entries.