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Way back in Janu­ary (although it seems like yes­ter­day) I stu­pidly made a few pre­dic­tions for the year ahead. So did any of them come to pass?

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.

Well, a year and a bit after launch, Vista has a mar­ket share of just 1%. A high pro­por­tion of this comes from the pre-install mar­ket with lower take up for upgrades. The upgrade mar­ket for Vista seems to have fea­tured an end­less pro­ces­sion of night­mare stor­ies and of people switch­ing back to XP. Although people who have had Vista as a pre-install or who wipe their drives first appear on the whole to be pretty happy with it. So broadly speak­ing, I got this right.

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.

The big news on this one has been Dell’s announce­ment that they will be selling laptops and desktops pre-installed with Ubuntu (with a server in the off­ing too). Admit­tedly, this is still a drop in the ocean and not what I expec­ted but it’s still pretty cool and close enough for me.

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).

Well, in Europe, HD DVD now has a mar­ket share of around 70% – enough said.

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).

And it was going so well. No real evid­ence of this hap­pen­ing, Google’s brand doesn’t have the god-like aura it once did but they still dom­in­ate the world search mar­ket (about 75% share). The Google OS/Office has sparked many people’s ima­gin­a­tions but the issues over off­line use rep­res­ent a crit­ical restriction.

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.

Doh! Again no real sign here. Wink has become a people search ser­vice. StumbleUpon has over 4 mil­lion users but that’s about it. I still believe that, long-term, this is a really inter­est­ing area – shame no one else appears to agree.

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.

Well, over­all this appears to be hap­pen­ing (if we believe the rhet­oric). Although too slow and too half-hearted. It sad­den­ing to see all the good words evap­or­ate as soon as the “cost to our eco­nomy” phrase is evoked. It’s time to break out the sun-block and move to high ground.

Last but not least, I will get my run­ning time down to a reg­u­lar 9min mile pace (yeah right).

Move on, noth­ing to see here.

Here’s to 2008. Have a good new year.