Well I might as well throw some ideas out there, seeing as (depending on how you look at it) some of what I thought for 2006 did come true. Google did come out with a calendar and if you are in line with the spirit of what I was thinking, it seems that Time agrees with me that “You” are the most important person of the year. It also seems that the people at Read/Write Web are thinking along similar lines. I think that this coming year will be the year that the consoles become king (with Wii on top) as computing comes to the living room and used for media management and personal communication. Traditional computers will increasingly become a commodity, to the point that “big metal” like my shiny new MacBook and MacBook Pro will be almost reserved for specialized uses and ubiquitous computing comes in the form of hand held devices like the cell phone and very cheap computers. I also think that we’ll see a real boom in the number of online apps as well. With any luck we’ll also see wireless service plans get cheaper, maybe cheap enough that we can start using phones in the classroom (at least in Higher Ed) on a regular basis.
I think there may be some push back with regard to the spec race as people might regard the content as being more important than it’s specs. So plasma displays will stall a bit unless they get really cheap, cameras will not explode beyond 20MP (who needs that for shots of the dog?? what about the storage associated with that?) and the HD DVD thing will fizzle unless there is some middle ground (ala DVD -/+).
We might also start to see the start of Web3.0 – the semantic web.
Ok, so this list isn’t as long as my last one, but that’s ok because like my list, I think 2007 is going to be all about content and usability.
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