Never mind 2005

By Paul McNamara
Network World Fusion, 01/10/05

With all due respect to my fellow columnists on the preceding pages and at the top of this one, predicting what will happen over the next 12 months is a relatively simple task. After all, the stuff that happened over the previous 12 months offers a good starting point, and conventional wisdom does a credible job of narrowing the variables. So, in the spirit of maximizing the prognostication degree-of-difficulty, and confident that I'll never be held to account, here's what you can expect to see on the technology front 10 years from now in 2015:

The state of Texas conducts the nation's first execution of a spammer and broadcasts the event live over the Internet. Nary a peep of protest is heard from death-penalty opponents.

The first kindergarten students carrying RFID tags - implanted in their buttocks at birth - begin classes at which taking attendance is accomplished instantly by the teacher waving a wand from the front of the room. The country's last remaining privacy advocate merely shrugs.

Bill Gates, 58, announces his retirement from Microsoft, a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Responding to a reporter's suggestion that he might become bored, Gates reminds his inquisitor that he has enough money to buy Florida and that "the rich are different because we never get bored."

Google, meanwhile, trumpets the company's latest advancement in search technology: a Web-based utility that literally allows one to find a needle in a haystack. The company also acknowledges that it might have too many developers with too little to do, now that it has indexed every word written or spoken - in any language active or dead - since the beginning of time.

A year after the FCC outlaws camera phones as "instruments of indecency," a bill passes both houses of Congress repealing the ban and is signed into law by President Arnold Schwarzenegger. "No one tells 'The Terminator' what's indecent," Schwarzenegger bellows just before he disbands the offending regulatory body with one swipe of his sword-shaped pen.

New research shows that the pornography industry spurs more technological innovation and generates more revenue online than any other e-commerce segment, proving once again that some things never change. Ring tones finish second in terms of revenue.

The nation's three largest long-distance carriers - Skype, Vonage and Wal-Mart - discover that issuing monthly gratuity checks in order to recruit and retain customers, instead of collecting payments from them, is not a sustainable business model.

Former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers strolls out of a federal prison - tanned, rested, but destitute - after completing a 30-day wrist-slap that had been delayed for almost a decade by a string of costly legal appeals that had the unintended side benefit of leaving him penniless.

According to IDC, Firefox is now the Web browser of choice for fully 90% of Internet users, a threefold increase since the product's development was wrested from the Mozilla Foundation and brought under the auspices of The Microsoft Open Source Consortium.

Offshoring stories reappear in the news as heavyweight technology manufacturers in China and India begin to transfer their low-paying call center jobs to the U.S. so that their own highly skilled workforces can devote more time to development work.

Appliance makers - we're talking toasters and refrigerators here, not network boxes - pull the plug on the Internet connectivity features in their products that had been hyped since the late 1990s but delivered only 18 months earlier. Reason? Too many virus-sparked kitchen fires followed by too many lawsuits.

Signs sprout up in public places that alert passers-by to the fact that wireless Internet access is not available where they stand.

Feel free to write if I'm wrong. The address is buzz@nww.com.

Don't be shy. Send all your Internet industry tips to Paul McNamara right this second.

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