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“Ah, but could it still qualify as a horse of a different color, Frank Morgan?”
I am OZ, the GREAT and POWERFUL!
“Frank, it’s 2017.”
Oh… that is a horse of a different color…
In all seriousness, Frank, my wife and I tip a pint our pints to you as we recall the endless hours of theater practice I underwent to manifest all your characters from 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz”. I raise an extra pint to celebrate your glorious mustache, but alas…
I must diverge from the stage now (or at least change costume to fit the next act) as the New Year has not even broken in and the soothsaying with regards to technology in 2017 has begun. This isn’t to say that all content with predictions to a particular field for the next four quarters is a bad thing. In fact, it can be quite illuminating when done properly, but that is most of the problem today and I believe it is related to both “too many sources/articles” and leaning so hard on bubble gum content surrounding the word “prediction”…
Predictions. Yes, PREDICTIONS, mind you, in a field of 1s and 0s. It would be these such characters that bring back memories of bad 1990s tech-based television: well tanned, paperless “experts” with their “forecasts” based on their “knowledge” and their “insights”, right? (This excludes the Computer Chronicles, Newton’s Apple, and the C|Net television segments that brought you the people from the companies with qualifications).
To all the replacement print ads that allows for the citation, regurgitation, and out of context use of otherwise useful content, I say to you: HUMBUG!
Certainly I could avoid this? Nay. In this day and age the industry has grown so large that an “online death” is impossible and “dropping of the grid” is a throw-back to Tron.
Here, I’ll make reference to a link that was dropped today (which can be found here), but do us all a favor and cut the crap.
So, without further adieu, I present:
Splagnak Dot Com Org: Where You’re Hearing Our Technology Predictions For This Year [Again]!!!
(Insert hip tag line, icons for 12 too many social media sites, and a PHP date value so we can increment this every year)
[Updated 03-JAN-2017 as my wife was curious to what IoT is/was/should be. I failed as a blogger, so I blogged some more!]
“Smart [insert plural noun]”
Until something can make toast, such as a “smart phone”, it isn’t smart. It isn’t aware nor does it have a burning desire to understand desire by itself.
Thus, Smart [fill in the blank] will only be as smart as that with which it fields and the development team, customers, and feedback loop given by those therein.
“The Internet Of Things Will [insert something impossible]”
The only consistent thing I have found over the last 2.2 years would be that Orwellian, double-speak, insulting clique term we know The Internet of Things (IoT for short). Sigh. I swear I have heard zero people use this around me in conversation, but for as much as it is injected into electronic and paper print, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those things was the return of the very beginning of the Internet-thing, itself!
Remember when AOL was the Internet?
EXACTLY! It never was The Internet, but it was definitely a huge thingy for as long as we predicted.
“An Internet by any other name would still be just as DARPA and POTS.”
Ah, using modems to send signals from one place to another over the nation’s plain old telephone systems was … priceless. Personally, I was a bulletin board system man, and with 2400 bauds of raw dial-up power between my floppies, I rocked the Trade Wars 2002 universe and still run a game server to this very day with much thanks to John Pritchett.
John Pritchett: I owe you an email after another year has gone by and to see how things are doing with yourself (and buy more licenses for my server, discuss my development of my own intergalactic adventures, After The Fall: 2042), but more on that later!
For those of you looking at other areas within the broader industry’s expanding technology, don’t be so quick to gamble away all your chips. One could say that, well, in The Things on Networks, at some point it can’t remain as a hobbyist’s kingdom, college student’s dorm experiment, or small office/home office’s (SOHO) …. Internet Thing, you know?
How many Pies, Nucks, Qubes, Radio Shack TRS-80, ZX Spectrum 80, and other single board compute-based experiments can an average person design, document, share, and post on YouTube about? We’ve done the maths. Picture a resurgence of those romantic day where pale, bare chested geeks died proclaiming their undying love to Violet the Barmaid in Legend of the Red Dragon (specifically on the Index BBS). Utilizing ARM processors, compiled code, and twisty bendy wires that snap into the Net of Interthings. It will no doubt (or doubtfully) become the latest craze as the technology improves this year (and possible into the next years).
“Big Data and Internet Security”
With expansion comes more surface. We have observed that this leads to two things:
- More of what was less, but now larger exposed to the hacker-sphere, flying debris, and general heat from fluid dynamics
- More resources in an effort to pull back big data across more surface area that is stretching along the Internet of Things
There will always be money, until one makes enough, in the collection of large amounts of data one can hold for ransom, sell to others on the IOT, and so forth. Legitimate businesses will still continue to thrive, as well and this can be seen by some of the latest screenshots pasted here:
Even the smallest amount of information or seemingly random fact can win you the championship at trivia night (which we predict many of you will do this year), but without remembering the old proverb exactly — be careful with both viruses and big data as:
If you make a map with every detail, you will soon find yourself in the world.
“The [insert spider web logic here]”
Naturally products in demand from last year will continue to be pushed this year. As such, count on having to sell something. Customers will buy your products as Open Source learns to take a sense of propriety.
Being industry experts, we’ve seen that over many decades products will be sold and eventually someone will call for support. Thanks to the expansive acronym of IOT, even companies from our last predictions should see a steady rise in call volume or an unavoidable collapse in size. It has always made sense, after all:
If you can’t make it yourself, buy out the competition, re-brand it, and rub elbows with the fortune 500 companies so they can eliminate that enthusiastic, intelligent man with genius and vision! Just you wait and see!
“Some [insert buzzwords here] Will Fall To [insert buzzword here]”
This year, expect many of the buzzwords you’ve come to love turn into vapor: revealing that it is pretty much the same thing as last year, but at a better or worsening scale. Oh, and the other buzzword will be folded into that other buzzword and then rolled into an existing standard or forgotten entirely.
Seriously, click here to see what I mean.
“The [insert buzzword] Will Stand In A Class All Its Own”
Yes. As redundant, yet slightly feature nuanced tech continues to be made, there will be an increase in entropy. If it has an IP and a MAC address, it is a target. In fact, if it exists… it can be targeted. The price of supporting such infrastructures, paranoia, and actual real threats will always be profitable.
“Everything [insert industry nickname here] Will March On!”
Yup and indeed.
Your wife may not know what the IoT is and she may have a masters degree in teaching, minors in mathematics, and donates her spare time to enhancing technology comprehension for her grade level, but trust us —
We predict we will be here sooner than you’d like to make the same conclusions you, clients, and industry leaders probably know!
So, with all of this sarcasm and depression, I think back to Frank and his illustrious career over film. I imagine his advice would be as such and I share it with all of us who toil to avoid the cliches and produce the finest work:
Well, in that case you should sit back for the next three months. Ignore the papers as they are no more accurate as an educated guess, a child throwing darts, and so on and so on. Spend not a dime nor a moment of time reading into such prophecies as they are all conjecture, borrowed, copied, stolen, or planted. This mechanical field of yours is fickle, but it has a heart, a brain, and courage.
Welcome, 2017. Let us each draw our own conclusions and see them to success.
-JK Benedict | @xenfomation
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