Valleywag: forecasts

Intel scraps sales forecast, but whatever

Paul Boutin — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:20:00 PST

Intel changed its Q4 forecast from 3 percent growth to a 12 percent slump, with profitability likewise down. Forrester CEO George Colony personally blogged three reasons not to worry:

1) Intel is not the bellwether that it once was. Personal computers and servers, the primary destination for Intel's processors, are not nearly as large a percentage of tech spending as they were back in 2001.

2) Layoffs in the economy have already begun. Fewer employees, fewer PCs needed.

3) Large companies are accelerating virtualization projects. Virtualization is a fancy word for running more applications on fewer servers. It is greener (less power), simpler (fewer servers to break), and cheaper. Good for companies looking to lower capital expenditure and operating expenses in a recession, but bad for Intel.

YouTube founder claims text is dead by 2018

Paul Boutin — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:20:00 PDT

"In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication." It's on the Official Google Blog, so take YouTube founder Chad Hurley's claim as a company statement. I envy Google's ability to have it both ways on just about any topic.

Hurley claims his own site's "exponential growth" means video is becoming the dominant means of communication — not just for news and entertainment, but for everyday communication between individual people. He ignores the real-world evidence that people vastly prefer text-based communications — email, IM, phone texting — rather than the video tools built into nearly all new computers and most phones. Because he's rich and works for Google, Hurley's claim will be widely quoted today, and conveniently forgotten in ten years. Here's what no one will ask him: Chad, why did you post your world-is-changing claim in text, instead of uploading a video? (Photo by AP/Danny Moloshok)

10 million iPhones shipped by end of this month

Jackson West — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:20:00 PDT

A group of Apple watchers have been compiling a spreadsheet listing product numbers of iPhones submitted by recent buyers. Presuming them to be sequential, they've come up with an estimate of at least 4,539,700
iPhone 3G handsets purchased. With 2.4 million suckers having shelled out as much as $599 for the firstgeneration model, and factories in China churning out over 800,000 units a week, his hot-tempered holiness Steve Jobs's prediction of 10 million units sold in 2008 could come true well before Thanksgiving. (Photo by George Panos) [Apple 2.0]

Forrester bests Jupiter at making money, making mistakes

Paul Boutin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:00:00 PDT

My esteemed colleague Owen Thomas worries that analyst firm Forrester Research, by buying its longtime rival JupiterResearch, has reduced the number of alternative opinions that will be floated in the media on any given topic. But by bringing Jupiter analysts including blogger favorite Michael Gartenberg aboard, Forrester will actually lessen the number of wrong opinions treated as near-fact by the mainstream media. I could spend a couple of days correlating Forrester vs. Jupiter on a spread of topics over the past decade. But screw it, I'm a journalist — two's a trend. Here are Forrester's two biggest misses I never forgot:

1998: Businesses will maintain separate networks for voice, video and data.

''What we try to do is demystify hype,'' Forrester's Maribel Lopez told the New York Times. ''The buzz, a lot of it has to do with data guys looking to sell the next router upgrade.''
Jupiter's Abhi Chaki disagreed, correctly calling the convergence of phone and video networks onto the Internet "an inescapable reality."

2008: Businesses will not support the iPhone for a long time.

"The features that make it a consumer success don’t necessarily translate to the enterprise," wrote Forrester analysts Benjamin Gray and Robert Whiteley. "IT can’t be expected to support each and every operating system their employees have brought into the company."
Jupiter's Gartenberg spotted the Achille's heel in Forrester's argument: If the CEO, rather than the IT guy, brings one to work, "it becomes a de facto enterprise business tool."

(Photo by Michael Neel)

Earth's elements in danger of being used up

Paul Boutin — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:00:00 PDT

It's one thing to use up the world's supply of a complex substance like oil. It's another to extract and deplete Earth's entire stock of a chemical element. We'll be out of gallium in less than a decade, warns science fiction author Robert Silverberg, thanks to its use in flat-panel TV and computer displays. Not far behind is zinc, with an estimated 30 years to depletion. Copper, too. There's only one proper capitalist response to the situation: Clear those three spots on the periodic table, and replace them with ads.

"Enterprise 2.0" growth trend promises to turn black-rimmed-glasses wearers into corporate stiffs

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:20:00 PDT

The good news? We might still have jobs in five years. The bad news? We'll all want to kill ourselves doing them. Forrester Research reports that by 2013 enterprise spending on "social networking, mashups, and RSS" will reach $4.6 billion. That will buy a lot of one-off brews at Blue Bottle. You'll need the caffeine to prop your eyes open, though, when you get to Forrester's label for the trend: "Enterprise 2.0." Care for a definition? Since we insist you share in our crushing disappointment, you're going to get one anyway. ReadWriteWeb on what Enterprise 2.0 is and isn't:

What it doesn't include is consumer services like Blogger, Facebook, Netvibes, and Twitter, says Forrester. These types of services are aimed at consumers and are often supported by ads, so they do not qualify as Enterprise 2.0 tools. Instead, collaboration and productivity tools based on the concepts of web 2.0, but designed for the enterprise worker will count as being Enterprise 2.0.

(Photo by Chance Gardener)

Tezcatlipoca exerts his revenge on your economic destiny

Jackson West — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 05:00:51 PDT

"Although the validity of Carl Johan Calleman's scholarship has been called into question by John Major Jenkins and others, it is interesting that Calleman predicted the current year (November 2007 to November 2008) to be the year of Tezcatlipoca — sinister deity of black magic and the jaguar — marked by economic collapse, war, and other threats." [Reality Sandwich]

Farewell, Year of the Widget

Owen Thomas — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 11:30:45 PST

Why did venture capitalist Ross Levinsohn's prediction that 2008 would be all about widgets seem so tired and predictable? Because it was. "If 2006 was all about social networks, user-generated content and YouTube, then it's a fair bet that 2007 will be about further personalizing life online," Newsweek wrote a year ago. Instead, 2007 turned out to be all about social networks, user-generated content, and YouTube. A shining example of how even the most obvious predictions are wrong.

Newsweek completely missed the coming Facebook frenzy. As for the Year of the Widget, what happened to it? MySpace bought Photobucket — an image hoster, possibly the least sophisticated widget there is. And that's about it.

Jeff Pulver on 2008: "We get a life"

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:40:07 PST

"What will be the app in 2008?" videoblogger Florian Seroussi asks Jeff Pulver, the Internet-calling pioneer who founded the company that became Vonage. "Life," Pulver answers, "I think we get a life." Nice thought. I'll take that bet. Seroussi's follow-up question: "Life 2.0?"

3 things you'll still hate in '08

Paul Boutin — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 17:00:08 PST

I should include end-of-year lists. But there are three even more annoying artifacts you'll be stuck with every freaking day of the coming year.

"Green" technology I live next to Whole Foods, so I overhear the most ridiculous self-serving pseudoscience while in line for my organic espresso. People think they're saving the Earth from Republicans by buying the right dishwasher soap to drive home in a Lexus hybrid that spews as much greenhouse gas per mile as the gasoline-engine version. You want to clean the planet? Demand that Al Gore stop India and China from becoming the world's new pollution supersource.

The semantic Web Tim Berners-Lee asks that you please stop having so much fun on the Internet. It's time to return control of the whole thing to a bunch of postdoctoral researchers who publish long tomes titled "Thoughts on a metamodeling architecture of Web ontology languages." You can read about it in this month's Scientific American, but — wait for it — the article's not published on the Web.

Facebook I use Facebook daily and truth is, there's not much there to write about. So I'm not sure why the entire mainstream media suddenly replaced "MySpace" with "Facebook" in the exact same overreaching misreportage they've been writing for three years. My theory goes like this: Every time some kid makes a few billion on paper, editors who know in their hearts they'll be juggling spreadsheets to make the mortgage payments for the rest of their lives get a little crazy. At the rate Web 2.0 is minting rich kids it's going to be a long, long year.

VC Ross Levinsohn on 2008: "Facebook plus widgets"

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 09:40:15 PST

What's in store for 2008? Ask ex-Fox exec and new Velocity Interactive Group investor Ross Levinsohn. "The deconsolidation of big media, something happening with Yahoo, I think, and probably widgets. Or Facebook plus widgets," Levinsohn told Kara Swisher. On second thought, don't ask.

"Someone will explain what WiMax is, which ...

Nick Douglas — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 02:05:59 PST

"Someone will explain what WiMax is, which I'll try to obtain only to realize it's unaffordable," says David of David's Log in his clever 2008 predictions.

1989 predictions that won't come true in 2008, either

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 11:40:13 PST

Fimoculous blogger Rex Sorgatz dug up a 2007 audit on the 1989 book, Future Stuff. The book describes 250-some consumer products that "should be in your supermarket, hardware store, pharmacy, department store, or otherwise available by the year 2000." It gets a few things right, like Viagra and flat-screen TVs. But mostly it's wrong.

My favorite prediction isn't "The Intelligent Toilet" or "The More Intelligent Toilet," but "The Most Intelligent Toilet." That's the one that "takes your temperature and your blood pressure, analyzes your urine and stool, and weighs you when ever you use it." Only thing missing are 2 girls.

2008 failure forecast

Paul Boutin — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 09:25:42 PST

I normally decline to make predictions, because what really happens is always weirder. But Valleywag's official 2008 list was such a borefest — I thought I was reading BusinessWeek or Battelle — that I cracked. Here's my fearless outlook.

TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat and Read/Write Web will merge into one giant Voltron-like supersite I don't read. Whoops, already happened.
Apple evangelists are right: A second-generation Apple TV will have twice the success the first model did. What's two times zero?
Google will have the most amazingly innovative layoff ever.

(Illustration by Uncov)

BusinessWeek journo: Facebook grinds to something in 2008

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 09:00:12 PST

"2008 is the year Facebook grinds to — not a halt — but definitely a slowdown. The backlash is already here. I've said it before; I'll say it again: Facebook flight." Ah, the sweet, juicy sound of BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl plopping his cojones on the table. We credit his bravado, but he's wrong. Beacon was bad for Facebook on the blogs, but users hardly noticed.

John Battelle's secret to making year-end predictions

Tim Faulkner — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 07:00:17 PST

Along with gifts, wassailing, and bah humbugs, the holidays bring an onslaught of predictions for the new year that mostly aren't worth reading. But if you are interested, egoblogger Robert Scoble sits down with the Supremely Tanned One, Federated Media chairman John Battelle, to ask how he manages to make predictions that are remarkably accurate. The secret, replies Battelle to the fawning Scoble, after first congratulating himself for his success rate, is: "A lot of these are not that difficult to predict." It doesn't take the ambiguities of a Nostradamus quatrain to predict that Microsoft would buy its way into advertising, Yahoo would struggle, blogs would get better, and people would call Web 2.0 a bubble. So if you are preparing your own predictions for 2008 and want to achieve a high success rate, don't predict — just state the obvious.

Valleywag's 25 predictions for 2008

Nick Douglas — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 23:11:27 PST

Valleywag is of course known for its dead-on accuracy, so our predictions for 2008 need no introduction. Inside, my 25 predictions (made without inside information) cover the futures of Facebook, Google, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, the Wall Street Journal, Apple, Yahoo, Gawker Media, AOL, Dell, LOLcats, the president, and more.

Facebook stays independent and private, strikes a meaningful deal that legitimizes its business plan, and buys a startup.
Born out of the writers' strike, at least one "Funny or Die" style site gets big buzz and maybe even gets bought, but it fails to produce any videos near the quality of FoD or Super Deluxe.
Google releases some limited version of voice search beyond GOOG 411. During the year, the company's stock tops $800.
Digg sells to a major media company for at least $200 million, and founder Kevin Rose starts a non-web-based company.
YouTube announces it's adding HD video, but the feature doesn't arrive until 2009.
Gawker Media, publisher of this site, starts a men's site and a Web show.
Yahoo suffers major layoffs, leading the press to dub it the next AOL.
Yet AOL is spun off and reframes itself. At the end of 2008, the company's future is still uncertain.
Apple releases a second-generation iPhone, and at least one New York Times article tries to draw a "middle class/rich" line between those who upgrade and those who stick with the first generation.
A new videoblogger emerges as the go-to example for slick independent daily vlogging, following Amanda Congdon and Ze Frank.
Tumblr, the pared down blogging service, enjoys the popularity that 2007 brought Twitter.
Twitter remains independent and spins off a new service.
The Internet again fails to drive one presidential candidate to success. So does Chuck Norris.
Jason Calacanis, still running his online directory Mahalo, starts another project.
A new meme started in a geeky part of the web infiltrates the "normal" population even more deeply than LOLcats.
Yet another e-book reader comes out and no one cares.
Blog search engine Technorati collapses after failing to get enough funding to stay afloat.
The Wall Street Journal announces it will soon be free online.
Blog platform maker Six Apart, having spun off LiveJournal and rearranged its exec staff, gets bought.
Dell screws up the good will it won in 2007 with another customer-service or bad-parts scandal.
Net Neutrality takes another hit from a telco-friendly Congressional bill.
Second Life plods along.
The TechCrunch blog network lands a regular TV appearance, if not a show.
The country tires of the last round of famous-for-being-famous celebs, and gossip blogger Perez Hilton's TV show gets cancelled.
A minor medical incident renews the "can Apple survive without Steve Jobs" argument.