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Happy new year, I hope Santa brought you every­thing you wished for (obvi­ously if you opted for peace on Earth you may have been some­what disappointed).

It’s cus­tom­ary at this time of year to make pre­dic­tions for the 12 months ahead. Of course, this is largely an exer­cise in ensur­ing you look pretty stu­pid at the end of the year. (It’s almost as if, sim­ply by pre­dict­ing the future, you can guar­an­tee that it won’t come to pass.) So with that in mind, and not want­ing to pass up the oppor­tu­nity of look­ing stu­pid, here are mine:

• I’ll start on safe ground. Dis­en­chant­ment with the Win­dows OS (its cost, secu­rity prob­lems, new licens­ing issues etc) will con­tinue a pace. Vista won’t live up to the Long­horn vision seen here (I love the “Com­ing Octo­ber 2003″ line). Of course, loads of peo­ple will still buy it and it will a boon for PC and mem­ory upgrade vendors.
• As a result, PCs and lap­tops pre­loaded just with Linux (and a shed-load of open source apps) will begin to take off, prob­a­bly with a new brand / sub-brand begin­ning to make a name for them­selves by spe­cial­is­ing in this area.
• HD DVD will win the for­mat war. Yes it’s early days but I think Blu-ray will suf­fer from Sony’s proprietary/lock in ten­den­cies despite being tech­ni­cally supe­rior (funny how every arti­cle about this brings up the spec­tre of Betamax).
• The Google brand image will wob­ble as it strug­gles to live up to the “don’t be evil” promise all while try­ing to utterly dom­i­nate the mar­ket. (As an aside, while peo­ple point to this mantra as some­thing highly aspi­ra­tional, I can’t help think­ing that not being evil is the very least a brand can promise.) The Google OS and Google Office how­ever will take off big time (see the Win­dows pre­dic­tion above).
• Social search (eg Wink and Stum­ble­Upon) will become ever more appeal­ing to many peo­ple who already trust their net­works more than any old school search engine.
• Clean tech will be huge with the largest area being energy pro­duc­tion. The big money will go into large national-scale projects but micro gen­er­a­tion will become a grow­ing polit­i­cal issue in a “let’s stick it to those black­mail­ing us over oil” kind of way.
• Last but not least, I will get my run­ning time down to a reg­u­lar 9min mile pace (yeah right).

Check back in a year for a good laugh at my expense. In the mean­time, have a won­der­ful 2007.

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