How did our Ten 2016 Predictions go?

At the beginning of the year we made ten major predictions for key technologies this year. They are tongue in cheek, as an antidote to the portentious projections that come out at this time every year but there is always a serious point behind them. Here's how we did :

1. There will be an infinite number of Tech forecasts coming out in the next few days/weeks. All will be mainly wrong (except ours of course).

Well this was an easy one to get right of course Our results were 6 spot on on, one happened this year when we thought it wouldn't, one didn't happen which we thought would, and one we got half right - so 6 1/2 out of 9, that's a higher hit rate than most so we will award ourselves a point for this one as well .

2. By mid 2016 there will be an Uber for anything and everything being pitched by someone, somewhere. By late 2016 an Ubermensch will kick-start an Uber for Ubers, and the cycle will implode up its own asymptote.

Not quite an Uber for Uber, we weren't serious about that - but there have been some real doozies pitched - my favourite is the Uber for your washing machine.

3. There will be an unseemly rush of Unicorns for the IPO gate. It will be seen that many Unicorns are just turkeys though, and they will jump the shark rather than the gate, which will mostly remain bolted.

We got this one half wrong - not in our view that that many had to rush for the gate or go to the wall - but that they could. Turns out that the bubblemarket started to deflate and there were very, very few - but there were quite a few failures and a general realisation that Unicorns were not what they should be - even the Economist at year end even pointing out that " a great many of the business models that have led to astonishing valuations for startups – like Uber – may be based on attempts to end run regulations to exploit workers, as opposed to technological breakthroughs"

4. By the end of 2016, the predictions that "2016 will be the Year of Mobile X" will be reset to 2017.

This is our annual snark at Planet Mobile, which - since we started the blog 10 years ago - has always been extremely (over)hyped about its prospects each new year. Our favourite is Ben Evan's series that started in 2014 that "mobile is eating the world". This year was no exception, but the world still remains uneaten, and next year's prediction of "mobile eating the world" has just come out. By the way, they are very good reads, but the title is endemic of Planet Mobile - no ways will you ever see a report saying "Mobile growth 2017 - doing nicely enough thank you" .

5. The worry about Ad Blockers being used will continue to increase exponentially faster than the use of Ad Blockers grows

The panic was overstated as predicted but one hopeful sign is the increasing realisation in the Ad industry that (i) they may be a cause of the problem and (ii) people who are using Ad blockers do not want to talk to you.

6. Another Tech Consumer Wearable will be released amongst great fanfare, and sink in a sea of indifference.

Well, Pebble surpassed us here and overall the whole market has still not lived up to the hype in 2016, and by some measures is even in decline. This year the Apple wireless ear thingies were released, and...well, can you remember what they were called?

7. Someone will point out that The Cloud is just Bureau Computing 2.0 and a natural commodity*, and it will be rebadged (again)
.

We were wrong - Cloud is still Cloud, the predicted total new-wine-into-old phase change has been pushed back

8. The Internet of Things Fridge use case will still be the most oft repeated one in public. In private, surveillance and monitoring will be.

You can't make it up - these two use cases crashed together and hit the headlines in a big way when the Mirai virus roped in surveillance cameras as well as all those dumb fridges, toasters etc using endemic IoT insecurty to launch one of the biggest DDoS attacks of the year. I guess technically we were wrong, in that the hidden use case became very public, but we are delighted to be wrong here, it as really put the cat among the IoT pigeons!

9. Artifical Intelligence will be seen as The Answer, despite the salutary experience of Die Antwoord (The Answer) with robot artificial intelligence. Someone will hack a traffic routefinder system and send all cars to Coventry.

The hype over AI has indeed gone into overdrive, but our point about self drive cars not really ready for use had more tragic outcomes than our tongue in cheek comment, with a number of drivers being killed in crashes

10. There will be multiple leaks of private user data, and users will still blink lemming-like every time it happens, believing that their free service provider values them as a special, unique snowflake (well it does of course, that value is their sale price)

And there were! Just before writing this Yahoo put the bow on the show admitting 1 billion accounts had been hacked in 2014. - and yet everyone still just seems to sign up, hit the "I agree" and dump their lives onto the 'Web.

So by our reckoning two wrong (one almost -over-wrong), one half wrong, six right, one we gifted ourself so 75% hit rate. Arguably the mobile one and "we'll be more accurate" are self righting, so 5 1/2 right out of 8 may be a better marker - a mere 69% then.....