Bob’s Predictions for 2019 — The Year When Everything Changes… Forever
Now, finally, to my predictions for 2019. This is, I believe, my 22nd and possibly last year of looking ahead, so I want to do something different and potentially bigger. Our old format works fine but I’ve been pondering this and I really think we’re at a sea-change in technology. It’s not just that new tech is coming but we as consumers of that tech are in major transitions of our own. It has as much to do with demographics as technology. So while I’ll be looking ahead all this week, coming up with the usual 10 predictions, I want to make sure we all understand that this isn’t business as usual. This time it really IS different.
I’ve been thinking about 50 year cycles. The year 1968, which was 50 years ago when I started writing this column back in November, saw a huge social and political upheaval with student riots all over the world, the rise of the hippy movement in the USA, the Summer of Love and the founding of Intel. Most of the technical progress we have seen since 1968 has been driven by microprocessors, which were largely the work of Intel. And it took 50 years, but we’re now approaching the Internet of Things, where processors will be in everything and everything will be linked or monitored, which is either good or bad depending who you are.Fifty years before 1968 was 1918, when America became a world power by participating in World War One. The American Century was assured by the end of 1918, because we were on the winning side yet suffered no battlefield carnage. It’s not by accident that IBM, for example, emerged from that war as a maker of something we’d not really seen before — business machines. Between IBM and National Cash Register (NCR, where IBM’s Tom Watson Sr. had started his career) the information technology industry was born, but we just didn’t know it.1968 was another year of transition, where political and social institutions were challenged in a terrain that was increasingly technology-driven. The kids who were protesting in 1968 (at least the American kids) were the children of World War Two veterans who were, themselves, the most educated in history because of the GI Bill. The kids of 1968 were smart and educated and solidly middle class where their parents had been wizened children of the Great Depression.The kids in 1968 were the first young people since the 1920s who could afford to be radicals.1968 saw the last newspapers set using Linotype machines. Offset printing was high tech after almost a century of Linotype.
1968 was also the year when Doug Engelbart — handsome as any leading man — did his famous Mother of All Demos at the Joint Computing Conference in San Francisco, showing us 50 years ago most of the technology we use today.
And 1968 was the year they turned on the Arpanet (commissioned by Bob Taylor in 1966) and what we now call the Internet was born....MORE
And February 27:
And his 'About' page:People — well, investors and financial analysts — seem to worry a lot about Apple. They tend to see Apple as either wonderful or terrible, bound for further greatness or doomed. What Apple actually is is huge — a super tanker of a company. And, like a super tanker, it’s hard to quickly change Apple’s direction or to make it go appreciably faster or slower. Those who see Apple as doomed, especially, should remember they are worrying about the most profitable enterprise in the modern history of business. Those who see Apple as immortal should remember that’s impossible.The worry about Apple in 2019 seems to be that the smart phone market may have peaked, or maybe that Apple has made the mistake of building their products so well that they last too long. Then there’s the concern that Steve Jobs is gone and why isn’t Apple reinventing itself and the world yet again through another new product category?Certainly the Earth is becoming saturated with smart phones, but they still do break from time to time, so I’m guessing what people are mainly worried about with Apple is that it will somehow stop growing. What’s wrong with that?Wall Street tends to see growth as vital. Funny, they never really explain why that is so. If Apple stopped growing completely but just continued to bank its normal $127 million in profit per day, would that be so bad? Apple could turn to increasing efficiency, and probably shrink the company yet increase earnings every quarter for years to come....MORE
Who Is Robert X. Cringely?
