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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.

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