| "After 8 years of nothing but messages of bad news and fear, the psychological lift of Obama’s inauguration will lead to a short term rebound effect on the market". Ahh, I miss the naivety of the ancient days of late 2008. In fact the market dropped from ~9000 at inauguration day to ~6500 by March. Obama's approval rating dropped from around 80 at inauguration to less than 50 now. And bad news and fear, as it turns out, still exist. "It will be a big year for applications that can play on big screens... video games, movies, etc." -- as a prediction, shrugworthy. "Similarly, the big news in the mobile world won’t be a slicker, newer cellphone -- it will be smart phone applications" -- this prediction wasn't too bad. "China’s GDP is likely to plummet in 2009" -- nope, it grew by something like 8% "This year we’ll see the first computer with no moving parts" -- trueish, though I thought that netbooks sans moving parts were already on the market in 2008. Wall computing: somebody has already mentioned this. "Carry-along computers will be hot" -- reasonably true. "Led by Europe, LTE (Long Term Evolution) will be the preferred technology for 4G." -- I don't even know what this means. "Not to be left behind, the less developed world will finally see widespread availability of broadband" -- y'see, as a prediction this one is hard to fault in that it's a long term trend and I'm sure there's some places in the third world that have acquired broadband over the last year. Still, I wouldn't say the last year has seen enormous progress on that front. "The Internet Assistant will be born" -- hmm, not really. And if a product which could book me a flight, a car, a hotel, and make dinner reservations automatically did exist, I wouldn't use it, since I wouldn't trust it to get me the best prices. "he was optimistic that having a new, competent, team in Washington, that valued science, technology, and innovation, would improve the country’s overall mood" -- a giggle seems like the appropriate response here. In conclusion, there's a few accurate predictions here, but they're just identifications of trends which should have been reasonably obvious in 2008. And then there's the impossibly naive political predictions which, the less said about the better. |
I think we should talk about how naïve some people were (and continue to be). Maybe it'll make people less trusting of people and institutions inherently untrustworthy. Of course, you could also call that hope naïve in and of itself. Oh well.