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Computer Industry Predictions | View information about Computer Industry Predictions within our Technology / Computer Trends section by reviewing this area of our website. We provide a wealth of information online to help our visitors become better informed about Computer Buzz. |
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Computer Industry Predictions
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There's no better way to make a fool of oneself than to try to predict the future. So here at Computer Buzz we thought we'd have a go at it.
We are encouraged and inspired by the likes of Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce. Those two prognosticators came up with hundreds, maybe thousands, of predictions, the vast majority of which were gibberish or just plain wrong, but, to this day, they are remembered and revered for the handful of wild guesses that more or less panned out.
So, we're going to try to add our names to the list of prescient computer gurus who can see into the future. Here we go.
(Adjacent photo shows Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), the most incompetent prognosticator since Nostradamus, false prophet, and our hero.)
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Blu-ray by a nose!
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The next big standards war is shaping up right now, and Computer Buzz is on it. We're talking about the struggle to see which compact disk format will succeed DVD. Tens, probably hundreds, of billions of dollars in profits hang in the balance.
When the original optical CD format came out, it held about 700 MB and, compared to the old 2.8-MB floppy diskettes it replaced, it seemed absolutely huge. It could hold an entire record album. A few years later, the 4.7 GB DVD appeared, and it could hold an entire movie! But DVDs are getting a bit long-in-the-tooth now, and their capacity is starting to seem claustrophobic.
Two totally incompatible formats are battling for the honor (and enormous profit) of being the next compact disk storage standard—Blu-ray and HD DVD. Blu-ray is promulgated by Philips and Sony; HD DVD is being developed by Toshiba. Both sides have lined up an impressive list of sympathetic corporate backers, some of whom are betting on both. One side will win, and one side will lose. Right now it could go either way, and those of you (and us) who ran out and bought Beta Max video tape players in the 1980s will be well advised to sit on the sidelines for a while longer, watching and waiting to see who wins this time before pulling out the checkbook.
Computer Buzz is going to go out on a proverbial limb and predict that Blu-ray will be the eventual winner in this high-stakes game. It may be a long, nasty fight—the two sides have had every opportunity to compromise, though that seems out of the question now—but Blu-ray has already lined up more (and bigger) heavy-hitting supporters. Now, it's true that HD DVD disks will be cheaper to produce because they can take advantage of existing assembly line technology, whereas Blu-ray disks will require expensive retooling. But Blu-ray disks also have a tighter track pitch, and that means they can hold more data, approximately two-thirds more (25 GB versus 15 GB in the single-side ROM format) on the same size disk. Bigger is better, so Computer Buzz is betting on Blu-ray.
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OLPC will fail.
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Computer Buzz predicts that the worldwide project known as One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) will be a failure, pretty much from the very start. Don't misunderstand; we think it's a great idea, and we're hoping to see it succeed, but there are just too many things that can go wrong with a grandiose scheme like this.
OLPC is a Delaware-based nonprofit organization whose goal is to develop a cheap, rugged, low power laptop computer that can be manufactured for $100 each in batches of multiple millions and then distributed to disadvantaged children all around the third world. Right now the cost is stuck at about $150 per unit and doesn't seem to be going down much.
The laptop design has been finalized, and it will be manufactured by Quanta Computers, a Taiwan-based company that is the largest maker of notebook computers in the world. It features a 433-MHz AMD CPU, a 7.5-inch screen (1200 x 900 pixils), 256 MB of RAM, 1 GB of flash memory, wireless networking with two adjustable antennae, a touchpad, stereo speakers, built-in microphone and color camera, three USB 2.0 ports, and a sealed keyboard to keep out sand and water. The computer has no hard drive, no floppy, no fan, and no optical drive. It's operating system will be a dumbed-down version of Fedora Linux, and it will come bundled with free, open-source application programs. The power source is a rechargeable battery pack and a pull-string generator.
The idea is for the governments of third world countries to purchase these cheap laptops and then distribute them to impoverished children in the jungles, deserts, urban ghettos, and boondocks. There is no doubt that the project's goals are noble. Promoters of OLPC are not shy about their ambitions; early optimistic press releases hallucinated about the production and distribution of 500,000,000 such laptops worldwide by the end of the decade! Subsequent estimates have been somewhat more grounded in reality―about a million or so per country.
The staff of Computer Buzz has a couple of years experience in the third world jungles of West Africa―a prime location for this noble experiment. We know a little bit about how those places operate, and it isn't pretty. The only law that the third world has any respect for at all is Murphy's Law, and it reigns supreme.
First of all, Quanta had better get their money up front, because third world governments generally have very poor credit (for the best of reasons), and repossession of the goods is pretty much out of the question.
Secondly, third world governments, at all levels, are more abysmally corrupt than even the US Congress ever thought about being. Once the laptops are unloaded on the docks, there's no telling where they'll eventually end up. If there are any scavengeable parts in them, they'll be disassembled and sold back to the first world for pennies on the dollar.
And in the event that one of these laptops actually does end up in the lap of a child, it is unlikely that he/she will know what to do with it. Before you can understand what a piece of (relatively) high technology is for and how it works, you first have to have a comprehensible use for it. The vast majority of all peoples in the third world would MUCH rather have the government give them $100 worth of food than a $100 computer gizmo that they have no use for. A computer is not, as the politically correct would say, "appropriate technology."
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Speed increases will slow.
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Ever since the first Apple II appeared, the race has been on to produce a faster personal computer. The early PCs were fast enough if you were running a word processing program, but the early spreadsheets and data bases clearly needed more horsepower.
There are any number of ways to speed up a PC, the most fundamental of which is to develop a faster CPU. You can make the CPU bigger (and more complicated), and you can make it run at a faster clock speed. You can also give it a bigger L2 cache, and you can add more RAM. Then you can drop in a faster after-market video card, a faster spinning hard disk, faster peripheral buses (e.g., Firewire, USB 2.0, SCSI, etc.)...and so it goes.
The generally accepted rule of thumb is that state-of-the-art computer speeds double every two years. Or, to put it another way, speeds increase annually by the square root of two (approximately 1.4...).
Computer Buzz accepts that digital throughput speeds are going to continue increasing indefinitely, but we are predicting that the rate of increase is soon going to slow significantly and perhaps even level off. There are several reasons for this.
Even space age technology runs up against insurmountable obstacles occasionally. And we're getting close to one in the facilities that manufacture our CPUs. The newest multi-core chips employ 40-nanometer circuits. That is, the thin gold lines that carry signals all around the chip are 40 nm wide. A year ago, the smallest circuits were 90 nm wide. That means that the new chips can use less energy when being run at any given clock speed. It also means that for any given level of energy input (and heat output), the chips can be run at a faster pace. All well and good, you say, but consider that an atom of gold is about 0.144 nm in diameter. If the gold atoms in the microchip circuits are packed as closely together as possible, the circuit will be less than 300 atoms wide, and that ain't much! You will appreciate that the little gold wires are not going to get much thinner than they are right now, and that puts a permanent end to speed increases related to this particular parameter.
And there is also the human factor. Programs like word processors and small spreadsheets do not benefit noticeably from speed increases. When typing as fast and furiously as you can, your word processor already spends most of its time waiting for you to strike the next key.
And then there's the Internet. The speed bottleneck there is not your computer; it's your Internet connection. There is an enormous amount of room for improvement in almost everyone's broadband connection speed, and it has nothing to do with how fast your PC is.
PCs are somewhat like automobiles. Most cars will go well over 100 mph (160 kph), and several street legal models will do 180 mph (300 kph) or more. But those vehicles are expensive to design and produce, and we don't have much use (or many roads) for that kind of speed. So, cars won't be getting much faster any time soon, and Computer Buzz predicts that PCs won't either.
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Nationwide Wi-Fi is coming.
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Wi-fi and/or free public access to wireless Internet connections are hot stuff in computerdom right now. Starbucks shops have helped to popularize wi-fi, and analogous Internet cafes have popped up in third world tourist areas. Many big hotels and office buildings offer free wi-fi connections, and some entire college campuses are rigged for wireless Internet already, with many more preparing to follow suite. San Francisco is studying a proposal to furnish wi-fi to the entire city!
Computer Buzz is predicting that within the next decade the entire lower-48 US will be blanketed with a wireless Internet connection signal that will be available to all; no subscription necessary. It may not be the fastest connection in the world—the commercial broadband purveyors will see to that—but it will be fast enough to be usable, and there will be no charge to use it, so the price will be right. Speaking of price, the infrastructure will be enormously expensive, so the government will have to take the lead. The justification for the project will be that in the modern world it will ultimately be even more expensive if we don't do it. There's a good chance that satellites in high altitude parking orbits will be required to propagate the wi-fi signal to all corners of the country.
Hawaii will come online quickly―it might even be first. Alaska will be dead last, especially the mountainous boondocks in the eastern part of that state.
But even before nationwide wi-fi comes to the US, it will become available in Europe first. For technological reasons, the low countries (Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands) will probably be the very first to have nationwide wi-fi. Then come Switzerland and Germany. The French will be miffed at their European neighbors' technological progress, so they will spend whatever it takes to catch up. The Scandinavian countries will not be far behind, nor will Great Britain. Spain and Italy will bring up the rear, but they still stand a good chance of having nationwide wi-fi before the US. Canada will probably get there before the US does, and Mexico won't even make an effort until they hear that Bangla Desh is up and running.
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Hello, Cheaper Music; Bye-bye, CD.
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Computer Buzz predicts that digital music will become significantly cheaper by the end of the current decade. Here's why.
To a large extent, you can thank Apple for its hugely successful iPod music player and its equally successful iTunes online music store. Apple has shown the world in general, and the recording industry in particular, that there is BIG money to be made by selling tunes for 99 cents a pop.
That, by itself, is not earth-shaking. But for the first time, music fans can cherry pick the tunes they want off of any given CD album and not have to pay for the ones they never want to hear again. The old concept of paying all-or-nothing for a twenty-dollar CD in order to hear one or two hit tunes on it is a thing of the past.
As online music purchases rapidly become the norm, hard copy CD sales in brick-and-mortar music stores are declining. Computer Buzz is predicting that the plastic CD, as a merchandise medium for music sales, will soon go the way of the vinyl LP and the 45-rpm single.
The fluff material and throw-away songs that most recording artists use to pad out a CD that contains only one or two of their best tunes is going to dry up once those second-rate songs are no longer needed for filler. Every single song/track will succeed or fail on its own merits.
This will bring more new music customers into the online stores and generate honest competition. Apple's iTunes may not be the big dog of the music business much longer. We look for other purveyors to undercut Apple's 99-cents-per-song price in the very near future, possibly to the tune of 49 cents per song. The next few years in the music biz are going to be interesting and exciting.
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