Tag: predictions

Predictions 2025: Tech Takes the Power Position

Look, I’m not much of an AI image-generation prompt writer.

This isn’t going to be a normal year.

2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises, particularly for those of us who watch tech closely. We’re not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure. For decades, we watched leaders from Goldman rotate through every administration’s cabinet and economic team, and we got used to it. But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence. And while the finance bros have a reliable and predictable ideology – capital is king – the subset of Big Tech bros who’ve bought their way into the Oval are evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as “techno optimism.” The sophomoric claptrap underpinning Andreessen and Musk’s approach to politics may not be representative of the tech industry overall, but for better or for worse, 2025 is going to be the year when the loudest voices in the room are all adherents of the Great Man Theory, and they all happen to have direct access to the Oval Office.

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Looking Back at 2024: How Did My Predictions Fare?

Nostradamus, so predictable.

Well, 2024 is in the books, and it’s time to grade my own homework. One year ago I posted my 2024 predictions, fresh off a so-so showing in 2023. So how’d I do this time? Pretty well, actually. To the results:

  1. The AI party takes a pause. One year ago I was skeptical that AI would continue its tear – it seemed to me we had a lot to process, both societally as well as in the tech itself. And while AI remained the top tech story, many of those stories were about how the technology seemed to be stalling. Halfway through the year, the Washington Post noted that “Wall St. Is Starting to See a Bubble.” By year’s end, the Journal declared “The Next Great Leap in AI Is Behind Schedule and Crazy Expensive.” Along the way, the headlines kept coming: “The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast,” “The AI Revolution Is Losing Steam,” the former top researcher at OpenAI seeing the “end of peak data,” the CEO of Google telling us that “the low hanging fruit is gone,” and finally, the Times, just this past week, asking “Is the Tech Industry Already on the Cusp of an A.I. Slowdown?” Prediction #1: Check.
  2. But Progress Continues… For my second prediction, I gave myself something of an out – yes, AI will take a pause, but there will still be a lot of interesting developments. And progress did indeed continue – tens of thousands of startups are toiling away at possible breakthrough applications, Google released Gemini, NotebookLM, and integrated Gemini into its core search and office products, OpenAI released SearchGPT and its reasoning models, AI-driven video became a reality at scale, Apple launched “Intelligence,” and everyone was madly trying to make “the agentic web” a thing (more on that in my 2025 predictions). So, check, lots of progress despite the pause.
  3. Big Tech’s Mid-life Crisis. “Every year it gets more difficult for the Amazons, Google, and Apples of the world to continue their ever-upward march” I wrote in defense of my third prediction, which inferred that the Apples, Googles, and Amazons of the world would, by year’s end, be seen in a worse light than at the start of 2024 (though I also said their stock prices would not suffer, and I certainly got that right!). While it’s not easy to prove, I think the narrative has largely held up. My reasoning here was that the tech industry was going to have to figure out what its role was in the world, now that it holds nearly limitless power. And I think that’s exactly what we got: The phrase “mid life crisis” certainly comes to mind for a particularly annoying group of big tech leaders – Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos and their peers, all of whom became players in a particularly florid drama involving acting out about their own power, kissing rings to protect their wealth, defending their turf from endless government actions, creating self-glorifying ads that miss the point entirely, and throwing tin-eared parties for themselves all along the way. I’ll give myself a win here, though I’ll also admit it was a hard one to pin down.
  4. Fediverse Rising. For my fourth prediction I held that the protocol-driven “fediverse” would have a good year. This played out, both through the rise of Threads throughout the year (now at more than 100mm DAUs, and 275mm MAUs), and the late surge of interest in Bluesky, which is based on a similar federated approach. It didn’t hurt that sentiment around X plummeted, and many social media players began moving off TikTok for fear of a government ban currently slated for late January. Overall, I’d grade this one a win.
  5. Apple Gets Bitten. I predicted Apple would spend the year dealing with its inherent growth issues, adding that the company would come to be understood as a major player in the advertising business, which would hurt its self-proclaimed status as a privacy champion. That’s exactly what happened in the Spring, when the size of Google’s payments to Apple came to light as part of the DOJ’s antitrust suit against the search giant. Apple also had a miserable year when it came to new product releases: The Vision Pro failed to impress (and sold far fewer units than predicted), Apple released an absolutely tone-deaf ad for its new iPad, and its “Intelligence” product launched to less than stellar reviews. So yes, Apple did get bitten in 2024, but as I also predicted, the company’s stock was still up and to the right. For now, anyway.
  6. Bright Spots Emerge in Media. I know, it was mostly doom and gloom in media again this year. But not if you’re tracking new approaches to the media game – and there were plenty of them, if you looked hard enough. First off, of course, is the rise of “creators” and “influencers” – a recent Pew study found that one in five Americans now get their news from influencers, and that figure rises to 37 percent for those under 30. Add in AI-driven aggregation apps (Particle, Bulletin et al), the continued rise of newsletter platforms like Substack and beehiiv, the rush to Bluesky – one might make the case that media was starting to look interesting again in 2024. And hey, DOC launched too! But to be honest, I didn’t find enough “bright spots” to confidently claim this prediction as a win. I’ll take a push here.
  7. Cars Will Keep Their Drivers. OK, one could argue that since Waymo rolled out in San Francisco and several other cities this past year, I was utterly wrong when I wrote “even if driverless tech was ready for prime time, municipalities – whose approvals matter more than state and federal governments – are decidedly not.” Then again, a limited roll out in a handful of cities does not make 2024 “the year of the driverless car.” But, I know when I’m wrong, and I’ll grade this prediction a fail.
  8. Enterprise Data Moves Beyond Marketing. Nope – at least not in a way that anyone can explain. While it’s true that the entire corporate world is in a tizzy about data-driven AI models that will change….everything, I’m not seeing much proof out there, at least not yet. I wrote that “this coming year we’ll see at least a few touchstone examples of data-driven applications from enterprise players that change the way B2B leaders consider justifying their investments in IT. And for once, it won’t be to make a marketing campaign more efficient.” I sense this is happening, but I just don’t have the examples to show it. I’d love to hear about examples that prove me right, but…I don’t have any to grade myself as anything other than a push.
  9. The New York Times Loses Its Suit Against AI. A clear miss, because the suit is ongoing, though it certainly looks like the Times is on the wrong side of this from an industry perspective (more and more media companies are closing their eyes, hoping for the best, and taking the money).

Well, that’s the scorecard: Of nine predictions, five wins, two pushes, and two misses. Not bad, but also not my best year either. Next week I’ll publish my 2025 predictions – look for hot takes on AI agents, whether TikTok will actually be banned, and Big Tech’s banner year. Until then, thanks as always for reading, and have a wonderful holiday season.

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Predictions 2024: It’s All About The Data

Let’s talk 2024.

2023 was a down year on the predictions front, but at least I’ve learned to sidestep distractions like Trump, crypto, and Musk. If I can avoid talking about the joys of the upcoming election and/or the politics of Silicon Valley billionaires,  I’m optimistic I’ll return to form. As always, I am going to write this post with no prep and in one stream-of-conscious sitting. Let’s get to it.

  1. The AI party takes a pause. The technology industry – and by this point, the entire capitalist experiment – is addicted to boom and bust cycles and riddled with blinkered optimism. In 2023 we allowed ourselves to dream of AI genies; we imagined trillions in future economic gains, we invested as if those gains were a certainty. In 2024, we’ll wake up and realize – as we did with the web in the early 2000s – that there’s a lot of hard work to do before our dreams become a reality. I’m not predicting an AI crash – but rather a period of digestion, with a possible side of Tums. Corporations will find their initial pilots less impactful than they hoped, and when told of the sums they must spend to course correct, insist on cutting back. Consumers will become accustomed to genAI’s outputs and begin to rethink their $20 a month subscriptions. Growth will slow, though it will not stagnate. Regulators around the world will take the year to move past Terminator nightmares and into the hard work of deeply understanding AI’s societal impact. IP holders – artists, newspapers, craftspeople – will press their lawsuits and infuse the market with uncertainty and hesitancy. In short, society will take a pause that refreshes. And that will be a good thing.
  2. But Progress Continues… It may feel like a pause, but below the tech media scorekeeping narrative, a growing ecosystem of AI startups will make important strides in areas that will matter beyond 2024. AI is driven by data, and as a society we’re not particularly good at structuring, governing, or sharing data. It makes sense that big companies with access to unholy amounts of structured data pioneered the AI era. (Of course, if you’re not a big company, and you want access to massive amounts of data, it helps to just take it without asking permission). But the AI-driven startups that will make waves in 2024 will do so by structuring discrete chunks of valuable information on behalf of very specific customers. It won’t make many headlines, but taken collectively, it’s this kind of work that will lay the groundwork for AI becoming truly magical. Read More
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Grading my 2023 Predictions: The Batting Average Dips

Well that was one hell of a year.

As I do each December, it’s time to grade my own homework. And the past twelve months certainly started out well. But unless a certain fascistic presidential candidate has a change of heart in the next few days (he won’t), I’m afraid I didn’t break .500 this year (last year I was smokin’ hot, I must say).

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Predictions ’23 – The Summary

I’ve used the image above for many years, mainly because I love how surprised the guy looks as he gazes into the crystal ball. Or maybe he’s just sat on something unpleasant. In any case, it pretty much sums up my approach to this, my 20th edition of annual predictions. I sit down, I might have an adult beverage on hand, and I just write until I feel like I’m done.

While reviewing my ’22 predictions (I did pretty well!) I promised to do something new: One post per predictions, ten posts total. But as I began that promised work, I realized it would test the limits of even my most dedicated readers (I see you, kids). So instead I wrote three long form posts, each with three or four predictions apiece. The first focused on AI, the second on advertising, and the third on markets, with a bonus call related to the ’24 election. Having now written all of them, I’m going to summarize them briefly in this “master post.” Grab your own favorite beverage, have a wonderful New Year, and read on!

  1. ChatGPT finds a business model. Because of course it will. Which leads to…
  2. Google launches a ChatGPT-inspired search interface. Because paranoia. Related…
  3. Microsoft launches “Enterprise Explorer” – because there isn’t a big company CEO who doesn’t want some AI to play with.
  4. There’ll be a war between the duopolies of Google/Facebook and Amazon/Apple. Grab your popcorn.
  5. Netflix will triumph. I know…but the next one’s even more far fetched…
  6. Twitter will rebound. (I’ll leave it there for now)
  7. Crypto will go sideways in ’23. But that’ll be a good thing.
  8. Tesla will continue to tank, and not because of Twitter.
  9. Tech IPOs will make a comeback by EOY.
  10. Trump will pull out of the ’24 presidential race.
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Predictions ’23: Crypto, Tesla, IPOs, and Trump Takes a Bow

My first two long form prediction posts focused on big topics – artificial intelligence and digital advertising. This one, my last, will focus on a grab bag of market-related topics that have dominated the headlines at one time or another over the past few years.

Let’s start with crypto. It’s hard to fathom how poorly the crypto market has had it these past twelve months, unless, like me, you were a participant in the Great Crypto Winter of 2018. During that downturn, crypto dropped as much as 90 percent – which means there’s plenty of “down” left in today’s already decimated markets. But what I find most interesting about crypto is how much of it is dominated by a day-trader’s sensibility. How much money did we make today? This week? This year? That thesis of crypto – that it’s all about money – was never what drove my interest in the space. Yes, I bought crypto, and yes on paper I made money – and lost more! But the point was always crypto’s thesis of decentralization, of new approaches to governance, and in particular – for me – new ways of architecting data flows in society.  Those ideas have been gaining traction all year long, and I don’t see them losing steam in 2023.

Then again, the price of ETH and BTC have become leading indicators of the sector’s overall health, and it’s disingenuous to pretend they don’t matter as it relates to whether more substantive investments are made in projects that truly unlock crypto’s potential. A down market may be the best time to invest, but down markets usually mean far less investment. And I don’t see crypto coming out of this down market over the next year. In fact, I predict that while there may be some significant swings one way or another, by the end of 2023, we’ll have essentially seen a push in the price of major crypto currencies. Is that a good thing?  I think it is  – the sector needs to find its floor, and start building from there once again. Everyone got well over their skis in ’21-’22 – and many lost their way entirely. It’s time to find our way back.

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Predictions 2022: How’d I Do? Strangely, My Best Year Ever

I’m planning something different for my annual predictions this year – I’m going to take the balance of this week and write an individual post for each one of my prognostications. Then I’ll write a summary post with short descriptions of each. I usually do ten predictions each year, which means I’m planning on writing 11 posts this week. That’s about as many posts as I wrote for all of 2022. I must be trying to make up for something. And just for fun, I think I’ll release the whole batch all at once, like a proper Squid Games binge. Just feels like the thing to do this year. Perhaps I’m hoping that by writing (a lot) more during this predictions cycle, I’ll kick start my flow for 2023 – as that’s pretty much my only professional resolution for the coming year: To write out loud much more frequently.

But before I do all that, we first must review the caliber of my prognostications for 2022. Twelve months later, how did I do? Let’s take a look:

  • My first prediction was that Crypto Blows Up. Remember, this was written in late December of 2021, when the price of Bitcoin was nearly $50,000. As I write, BTC stands at around $16,500. Many less “stable” coins have been wiped out entirely, and overall, the crypto markets have dropped by nearly $2 trillion since last year. Indeed, crypto did blow up – and many of its heroes are now under house arrest or on the lam. In my prediction I got plenty both right and wrong: “the market will grow massively (wrong) but be beset by fraud, grift, and regulatory uncertainty (right), as well as an explosion of new apps (wrong, unless you count FTX as an “explosion”…).” But overall, crypto did what I predicted: It blew up, big time. Check.
  • Second prediction: Oculus will be a breakout hit, but it’ll  immediately be consumed in the same controversies besetting the rest of Facebook’s platforms. Um, oops. I mean, the second part of that prediction proved true, as Oculus’ flagship Horizons app was immediately beset by allegations of sexual harassment and worse. And early in the year, Oculus sales were looking promising. But I must have been stoned on the first week or two of my new Oculus headset back when I wrote this prediction, because I couldn’t see far enough into the future to realize that pretty much everyone who bought one would use it for a week or two, then leave it forgotten in a bottom drawer – just like I did. I’ll score this a big miss.
  • Next up: Twitter changes the game. Well, I certainly got that right, but anyone who could have predicted the HOW of that statement deserves a place next to Nostradamus in the prognosticator’s hall of fame. In the explanatory text of this prediction, I laid out several major product changes that I felt the company was poised to execute on, given it had a new CEO (Parag Agrawal) who seemed capable of focusing the company on core technology and feature challenges/opportunities. But who could have foreseen the advent of Space Karen and his goons of doom? Not I. I should have predicted that I’d be off the service by the end of the year (you can find me on Mastodon now.) But I’m going to grade myself as mostly right here – Twitter did change the game, big time. Just not in a way anyone could have predicted. Check.
  • Fourth, I predicted Climate has its worst – and best – year ever. The first part of this prediction was a layup – of course things got worse this year. How could they not? Climate disaster stories dominated the news – nearly every week another terrible climate-driven catastrophe was revealed. The latest: the death of at least 25 people in Buffalo, New York just this past week. But determining the accuracy of that “best year” claim is far more difficult. I write: Best, because finally, the political will to do something about it will rise… in particular in the United States. Did that happen? Well, buried in the misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” was, in fact, proof of that political will. The Environmental Defense Fund called it “the biggest package of climate investments in U.S. history into law,” and they’re not wrong. We did, in fact, do something about climate this year. Is it enough? Not nearly, but it’s a good start. Check.
  • Fifth, “The return of the office... we work best when we work together, and by year’s end, the “new normal” will be the old normal – most of us will go back to going into work.” As with crypto, it wasn’t as easy to predict this back in late December of 2021 – when nearly everyone was saying the world had changed forever, and businesses must bend to the newly powerful will of the independent workforce. By this past Fall, major newspapers were declaring “The early results are in: The return to work is working.” Yes, work has changed forever, and it seems that hybrid/2-3 days a week is becoming the new norm, but I’d say 2022 was indeed the year the office made a comeback. Check.
  • Next, a tough one to crow about but…exactly one week before January 6th, I predicted “Divisions in the US reaching a boiling point. I hate even writing these words, but with the midterms in 2022 and a ’24 campaign spinning up, Trump will return to the national stage.” I don’t like taking a victory lap here, but…well this certainly happened. Check.
  • For my seventh prediction I made the rookie mistake of getting overly specific. The headline: Big Tech bulks up. The specificity: Despite a doubling down in anti-trust saber rattling from the EU and the Biden administration, Big Tech companies must grow, and they’ll look toward orthogonal markets to do it. Meta and Apple will buy gaming companies, Amazon will buy enterprise software companies, and Google will buy a content library. Well, I don’t think I got this exactly right. 2022 was not the year Big Tech bulked up – they mostly spent the year on extreme defense, cutting staff and fighting regulatory oversight. Meta did buy two Oculus related companies, then got slapped with an antitrust action around a similar acquisition in late 2021. Apple slowed its pace of acquisitions to a similar trickle. But there’s some hope for my prediction from Amazon: The company got seriously acquisitive in 2022, buying six companies, including iRobot and One Medical. Google also sped up its spending spree, buying ten companies, but none of them were content libraries. However, just this past week Google acquired rights to NFL Sunday Ticket – and there’s simply no more valuable content play in the US than football. Net net, I think I got this about half right. Let’s call it a push.
  • My eighth prediction was contrarian at the time of writing, but I’d say it came out a slam dunk: “The streaming market takes a pause. The advertising business has yet to catch up with consumer behavior in the streaming television market, and as I’ve written elsewhere, the consumer experience is fracking awful. In 2022, those chickens will come home to roost.” Well…yup. 2022 was the year that streaming paused – a chart of Netflix’s share price acted as proxy for the entire industry.  Check.
  • Number nine: “TikTok will fall out of favor in the US. Everyone is predicting that 2022 will be The Year Of TikTok, but I think they’re wrong in one big way: This won’t be a positive story.” Wow, I’m starting to think I had a pretty good year! It wasn’t easy to predict that TikTok would end up a negative story – This Information story summarizes the service’s momentum early in 2022: Advertisers Love TikTok – Now They’re Looking to Double Their Spending On It. And here’s how the press is categorizing TikTok today: TikTok’s parent company ByteDance admits to spying on U.S. users. Politicians are out for blood. Yep, it’s not been a great narrative arc for TikTok in the United States. Big Check.
  • Finally, my tenth prediction was a massive sandbagger. Here’s the prediction in full: “Trump’s social media company delivers exactly nothing.  Hey, I needed one sandbag in the mix – and this one comes with a heaping side of schadenfreude. The company will become mired in legal fights, and Trump, having grifted a billion or so from favor-currying investors, will move on to ever more ruinous pursuits.” Yep. Well, OK, Truth Social still exists, but it certainly does not  matter, and the company spent most of the year not paying its bills, failing to complete its SPAC, and being generally irrelevant in the national conversation. And while Trump demurred at Musk’s invitation to re-join Twitter, supposedly because Truth Social is a superior platform, we all know he couldn’t stand to play second fiddle to a richer man who commands more reach and takes all the oxygen from the room. Check.
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Predictions 2021: Disinformation, SPACs, Africa, Facebook, and a Return to Tech Optimism

Never in my five-plus decades has a year been so eagerly anticipated, which makes this business of  prediction particularly daunting. I’m generally inclined to be optimistic, but rose-colored glasses stretch time. Good things always take longer to emerge than any of us would wish. Over 18 years of doing this I’ve learned that it’s best to not predict what I wish would happen, instead, it’s wise to go with what feels most likely in the worlds I find fascinating (for me, that’s media, technology, and business, with a dash of politics given my last two years at The Recount). As I do each year, I avoid reading other folks’ year-end predictions (though I plan on getting to them as soon as I hit publish!). Instead, I just sit down at my desk, and in one rather long session, I think out loud and see where things land.

And off we go….

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Predictions Review: Trump, Zuck Crush My Optimism In 2019

This past year, I predicted the fall of both Zuck and Trump, not to mention the triumph of cannabis and rationale markets. But in 2019, the sociopaths won – bigly.

Damn, was I wrong.

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Halfway Through: How Are My Predictions 2019 Shaping Up?

I like to keep myself honest when it comes to predictions. Now that six months of 2019 are in the books (well, nearly seven given how intermittent my postings have been this year), it’s time to see how things are tracking.

Regular readers may have noticed I’m not really written much this year. This pains me, but it’s because I’ve been deep in a new project, one focused on a new market and a new media format. There’ll be news on that soon enough, but for now, let’s review my 2019 predictions and see how I’m doing.

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