Like a lot of people, I had some fun a year ago and made some predictions for 2006. Now that the year is pretty much over, I guess I should see how I did:
- SORTA RIGHT: Canada did indeed win the World Juniors, but we didn’t win the Olympic gold medal.
- SORTA RIGHT: In March, RIM settled its lawsuit with NTP, but it was later sued by Visto. I don’t think that has been solved yet. On the consumer front, the BlackBerry Pearl is off to a great start!
- WRONG: Ah not even close. The Steelers won the Superbowl.
- WRONG: Well we did get the Zune which has wi-fi, but I guess I was a little early on this one.
- MOSTLY WRONG: Apparently Toyota is still #2 in the world, but GM continues to have financial troubles.
- MOSTLY RIGHT: The PS3 did in fact launch, and it was in fact really expensive. Too early to tell what level of success it will have.
- WRONG: Man, who would have thought the Oilers would get so close! I don’t know why I picked Ottawa, they always choke.
- WRONG: Vista RTM’d in November, not September. I am sure the usual suspects made their usual claims.
- WRONG: Wishful thinking I’m afraid, but we did see Gears of War!
- WRONG: I think the iTunes/iPod combo still has a firm grip on the market, despite a (disputed) report that iTunes sales fell drastically in 2006.
- SORTA RIGHT: Apple launched their Intel-based machines very successfully, but I haven’t found anything that says their market share has increased. Some say it has decreased.
- SORTA RIGHT: Michael Schumacher did retire, but unfortunately didn’t win an 8th championship.
- RIGHT: I don’t have a link, but I seem to recall reading about Symantec suing Microsoft over security stuff in Vista.
- MOSTLY RIGHT: Not sure about big numbers, but TV shows made a splash on iTunes, and there are now dozens of online video stores. And for Americans, TV shows and movies are available on Xbox Live. And in general it was a huge year for video, thanks to YouTube.
- WRONG: No one bought TiVo.
- WRONG: The Liberals didn’t win the election.
- WRONG: Hard to say if Google stumbled in 2006. There wasn’t a big mistake, but maybe the little ones will add up.
- RIGHT: Looks like The Da Vinci Code was #2 at the box office this year!
- GLADLY WRONG: Thank goodness, the US did not invade Iran. The UN did recently impose sanctions however.
- RIGHT: I think lots of podcasting companies (pluggd, Podcast Ready, etc.) found success in 2006, ourselves included!
On January 7th I posted about multi-core processors. While it wasn’t in my list of predictions, it could have been:
Perhaps a year from now you won’t ask someone how fast their computer is. Instead, you might ask, how many cores do you have?
I think I almost nailed that one! Except that for the moment, the question is usually “do you have a dual core?” Close enough 🙂
I’ll probably come up with some predictions for 2007 later, and hopefully I do better next year!
Read: Predictions for 2006