This is when I typically generate a list of technology predictions for the coming year. The challenge this year isn’t coming up with predictions, it’s finding a moment of calm to share them when people are most likely to read. With a pandemic rolling along and the nation in political and economic crises to boot, such a moment of clarity isn’t likely to ever arrive, so I’ve decided just to write the damned columns and see what happens.
This is when I typically generate a list of technology predictions for the coming year. The challenge this year isn’t coming up with predictions, it’s finding a moment of calm to share them when people are most likely to read. With a pandemic rolling along and the nation in political and economic crises to boot, such a moment of clarity isn’t likely to ever arrive, so I’ve decided just to write the damned columns and see what happens. This is the column in which I’ll review my predictions from 2020 to see how I did and whether it is even worth your while to read further. Having done this for over 20 years, historically I’m correct abut 70 percent of the time, but this year could be a disappointment given that I’m pretty sure I didn’t predict 390,000 deaths and an economy in free-fall. We’ll just have to see whether I was vague enough to get a couple right. The next five or six columns, will each cover a prediction for 2021. The last of these prediction columns will be an update on my Mineserver project that, but that will be 7-10 days from now. You’ll just have to wait for it, because that story is still in some flux. Now to don my hair shirt and admit my mistakes. I predicted that IBM would dump a big division and essentially remake itself as Red Hat, its Linux company. Well yes and no. IBM did announce a major restructuring, spinning-off Global Technology Services just as I predicted (score one for me) but it has all happened slowly because everything slows down during a pandemic. The resulting company won’t be called Red Hat (yet), but the rest of it was correct so I’m going to claim this one, not that anybody cares about IBM anymore. I predicted that during his first impeachment trial government technocrats would turn on Trump. I didn’t go so far as to predict an outcome of the trial, so I cheated death with that one, but certainly the testimony of Fiona Hill, George Kent, Gordon Sondland, Bill Taylor, Alexander Vindman, Jennifer Williams, and Marie Yovanovitch showed the « deep state » was willing to speak on the record, though every one of those witnesses suffered for their candor.
