Every year I spend about two months out in Silicon Valley. I am always here for several weeks spanning mid-December to mid-January, which allows me to listen to end of year summaries and reviews and new year predictions for the technology industry, right here in the Silicon Belt.
Even here, where technology stories routinely top the news and even milk cartons have Web addresses printed on their sides, making technology predictions is somewhat akin to playing a slot machine. You can declare your belief and pump in the coins to back your hunch, but those little fruit icons rarely line up the way you want them too, even for the experts.
Sometimes they do not line up at all, and the hot predictions at the year's dawn end up as cold, has-been technology stories by December. In early 1997, "push" technology, for example, seemed a great idea - a Web method of broadcasting information directly to online subscribers whenever they were online.
Pointcast became the push company of the moment, and millions of people at work drove their systems administrators into babbling insanity by clogging up company networks with Pointcast's continuous data stream. Companies instituted no-Pointcast policies and users got bored or annoyed with a desktop which could not sit in the background quietly and stop all that distracting downloading.
Raise your hand, anyone who still has Pointcast on your computer desktop. Anyone? I thought so.
Most of the time, the slot machine icons line up in new combinations that few had imagined. For example, there are always year-end reviews which emphasise Apple Computer's continuing woes and predict the former giant's final fall in the coming 12 months (name a year; this has been the case since about 1988). Apple always managed to pull itself through.
There were a few of those predictions at the start of 1998, too. This year, one word has changed the Apple landscape into an upbeat one: the Internet-ready iMac. None of the pundits predicted the little blue machine's impact or imagined its success last January - it was best-selling consumer desktop in November, according to PC Data, and a top seller since its August launch.
Excepting the sharper venture capitalists who consistently seem able to pick winners in a constantly shifting field, let's face it: technology predictions are mostly a hopeless affair.
Consider a few of this past year's gobsmackers. Two years ago, few imagined Microsoft's current legal difficulties. Eighteen months ago, who would have imagined a third of all US share trades would be via the Internet? A year ago, everyone pronounced online shopping malls dead and gone; this holiday season, as online shoppers rang the virtual tills, the malls saw their triumphant second coming.
Who could possibly have dreamed a mainstream force and Microsoft marriage partner like Intel would have made an investment in a rebel operating system like Linux? Or that kludgy old America Online would snap up Netscape? For that matter, who would ever have believed a year ago that AOL's stock would perform at 305 per cent and AOL would enter Standard and Poor's 500 stock index?
Hello? This is AOL, once the whipping boy of the Net-savvy; AOL, now such a ubiquitous part of American life that a film can be titled You've Got Mail and millions understand the plot must revolve around email. (When you have email waiting on AOL, a cheerful male voice says, "You've got mail". In a bizarre subplot, AOL is suing telecommunications company AT&T, which is using the phrase "You have mail" for its Internet service. As AT&T's lawyer said, how else do you convey the general concept without the words "you", "have" and "mail"?)
So I'm not making any predictions for 1999. A more reliable approach is to take the attitude of the White Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, who was capable of believing up to six impossible things every day, before breakfast.
You have to bring a certain amount of cynicism to the breakfast table as well, of course. But it's important to remember the one absolute certainty in this industry. The best technologies are created by people who are driven by a belief in the viability of impossible things.
Karlin Lillington is at klillington@indigo.ie
