I mentioned before that I wanted to make some predictions about the coming year like I did last year. It’s surprisingly difficult to think up things like that but the challenge is enjoyable and seeing the results is entertaining. I’d definitely encourage others to do it. Anyway, without further ado…

* The Xbox 360 will be hacked in some form by the end of march at the latest.

* Futurama will not be put back into production despite the internet hype.

* A Sony PSP with a built in hard drive will not be released in 2006.

* This will not be “the year” of HDTV despite anything Sony and Microsoft have said.

* The POWER architecture will continue to be very competitive and groundbreaking during 2006 but will become increasingly more specialised. We will not see a successor to the PowerPC 970 (G5) or PowerPC 7448 (G4), i.e. no more workstation-class chips.

* SCO will still not foresee their inevitable defeat in the courts in 2007 and will keep up the downward spiral in their ridiculous lawsuits all through 2006.

* Video game activist Jack Thomson’s five minutes of fame will be well over as 2007 ticks over despite his current high profile.

* Other music companies will abandon copy-control on audio CDs much like Avex did last year.

I’m not touching any Apple/Intel predictions. I am still planning to pick up the Intel based 12″ Powerbook when it makes it out the door and the new MacBook Pro (Stupid name) actually seems like a decent piece of hardware although too large for my tastes at 15.2″. Some of the new software Apple has put out looks pretty useful and I always feel stupid paying for software separately when I could just get it bundled with a new machine that I plan to buy anyway. ^_^;

Oh, and it will be interesting to see how my “hac-chan” experiment goes. It seemed like an interesting thing to try with the Hamilton Anime Club running into hosting problems. Ah well, only time will tell.

It’s a new year and like many, I have felt the need to look back at the year in general and past blog posts as well. At this time last year I made a bunch of predictions regarding the year ahead (Only my wordpress blog goes back that far). So far, well, my success rate appears a little dire, hehe. I’ll go through them one by one anyway.

I predicted…”The Sony PSP will not only outsell the Nintendo DS but will go on to become the dominant gaming handheld in the market.”

Clearly this has not happened so I have to count that as one I got wrong. I still think this is the general direction things will go, the Nintendo DS is very clearly dying in NZ with it being pulled from Harvey Norman and it’s shelf space declining greatly in general here but Nintendo consoles are rarely popular in NZ anyway so this hardly shows a worldwide trend of any kind (Gamecube support in NZ was/is very similar). Unfortunately there are no sales numbers out for recent months yet. There are good Nintendo DS games if you import but there are many good PSP games for import too and many are just as revolutionary as anything for the DS. I still hold this prediction for the long term but there is no denying the DS has been a success as far as Nintendo is concerned. It is not doing as well in the rest of the world as it’s doing inside Japan though.

I predicted…”Sun Microsystems will continue their decline.”

Now this prediction I’d almost have called true but recent events have made me rethink this. Sun appears to be heading in the direction of “Give away the software to sell the hardware” which is a business model almost the total oposite of the rest of the industry. To me at least, this makes a lot of sense. On top of this, their “Niagra” chip based machines appear to be very competitive and prove there is still some life in the UltraSPARC line. I’m really not sure how things will go but it’s a real sign that Sun is at least innovating and focusing on their business at hand rather than trying to spoil everyone else’s. I don’t feel I can really say I was wrong or right here. I think this one will take more time.

I predicted…”There will not be a video capable iPod in 2005. Beyond 2005 maybe, but I don’t see it this year.”

I could not have been more wrong on this one. When this prediction was made, there was evidence to suggest a video iPod was being worked on and I was going very much the general opinion but I felt that the infrastructure needed to support such a device was not there and would not be in 2005. Comments from within Apple also suggested it would not come out and Steve Jobs realising he is wrong is not something I’ve seen until this year. I’d argue the video iPod was released too early, there does not seem to be real demand for portable video on iPods and the infrastructure still does not appear to be there but it may also be a somewhat kneejerk reaction to Sony’s PSP. Much to the surprise of many (including me), Sony is doing big business in UMD movies and Apple may have wanted to have a competitor out there sooner rather than later.

I predicted…”LCD monitors will finally reach the point where they are worthy replacements for a high quality CRTs”

Yet another one wrong. I figured a year would be enough for the industry to get things right but no, it seems the problems with this technology are not so easy to solve. Viewsonic’s recent VP930 release seems to be the closest to LCD nirvana currently available but it still has too many typical LCD flaws. NEC’s LCD2180WG-LED-BK shows a lot of promise in regards to colour reproduction, if only it’s latencies were better or the price was not ridiculous.

I predicted…”(NZ only) Madman NZ will continue to release the worst anime titles ignoring all the interesting and unusual titles.”

I’m going to call victory on this one. It’s not that Madman NZ haven’t released some good titles this year, in fact they’ve managed to release quite a few interesting series outdoing 2004 in my book, but these are largely safe titles that would either be cheaper licenses or would clearly sell well. I do though feel a bit guilty for even making this prediction in the first place…I mean what else could I expect?

Simc made the prediction…”Microsoft will be forced to change its strategy (if it hasn’t already) in the web browser market to combat Mozilla, rather than continuing to tell people IE is fine and to wait until longhorn comes out.” I agreed with this prediction.

It was publicised a while back that Microsoft had decided to do an IE release before Longhorn. Not much more to say here really, Microsoft had clearly dropped the ball here and could not let the gradual adoption of Firefox continue unhindered until Longhorn finally ships. Letting competitors have the space they need to compete is not a mistake Microsoft makes often.

I plan to come up with some 2006 predicitions, hopefully I can up my success rate with the next batch. I will do my best not predict anything inevitable though since that just takes all the fun out of it.

Current Mood:  lazy