As often is the case I end up being ridiculously busy at this time of year and rarely get to make a post. I always feel the need to say around this time of year that I’m not disillusioned with blogging, I’ve always done it because I wanted to more than anything and nothing has changed in that regard. I have other posts to make but first I wanted to take a look at my 2006 predictions. It’s always fun and enlightening to look back over the past year to see how things have changed and how different the future was to what you expected. It’s also interesting to get a feel for how the relevance of something may change over time. Without further ado, here goes.

*I predicted that the Xbox 360 would be hacked in some form by the end of march 2006 at the latest.

This came true, but not in the way I envisioned when I made this prediction. The firmware for the 360’s DVD drive was indeed hacked around the middle of march 2006 allowing unsigned code to be run. Due to the increased importance of online services though it has proved of little importance as people did not want to be banned from Xbox Live for using hacks.

*I predicted that Futurama would not be put back into production despite the internet hype.

I got this one outright wrong. What do you know, it seems big corporations occasionally do take note of mass opinion. I honestly didn’t think Fox would cave on this, I’m inclined to put it down to admirable efforts of the very vocal fan base.

*I predicted that a Sony PSP with a built in hard drive would not be released in 2006.

True. At this time last year many were talking of a new PSP model being released in 2006 with a hard drive and some planned to wait for the release of such a device. To me it didn’t make sense, Sony is not a company to quickly back out of a format they have bet on such as UMD and the infrastructure to support a hard drive based portable gaming/media platform was not in existence at the time from anyone but Apple. The infrastructure I mentioned is just starting to become available now but I should talk more of that later.

*I predicted that 2006 would not be “the year” of HDTV despite anything Sony and Microsoft had said.

This was true. Consumer resistance to HDTV in 2006 was very high. So much so that Capcom recently had to modify Lost Planet on the Xbox 360 so the text was readable on standard definition TVs. I do think HDTV is inevitable long term but 2006 was definitely not the year it hit critical mass.

*I predicted that the POWER architecture would continue to be very competitive and groundbreaking during 2006 but would become increasingly more specialized. That we would not see a successor to the PowerPC 970 (G5) or PowerPC 7448 (G4), i.e. no more workstation-class chips.

To date this has held true. Post PowerPC 970 workstation class chips appear non-existent and as far as I’m aware, none are planned. The specialized embedded, Xenon and CELL processors do appear to be holding their own as is IBM’s POWER line. Development of the POWER6 and POWER7 are well under way with POWER6 due sometime later this year. This one does feel like a hollow victory though since very little has changed through 2006, it would seem that general architecture trends are a more long term process.

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

This is true. As 2007 starts SCO are still fighting the inevitable in the courts but at this point 95% of their original case has been thrown out. Then end of the road is much closer now but they still do not see the light.

*I predicted that video game activist Jack Thomson’s five minutes of fame would be well over as 2007 ticks over despite his high profile at the time.

Jack’s profile is much lower than it was at this time last year but he’s still well reported on and was featured in a recent Penny Arcade comic. To me it seems I got this one wrong.

*I predicted that other music companies will abandon copy-control on audio CDs much like Avex did in 2006.

This is a hard call because there have been no press releases. Many music publishers world wide are clearly using CD copy protection far less than in the past, so much so that I can import a CD now without even looking to see if it’s copy controlled. The general industry view seems to be that this idea was a failure and didn’t provide the results they wanted. Here in NZ on the other hand the decline in number of copy controlled CDs has been slower, and I’m really not sure what the reason for this is. It does seem most end up in the bargain bin but there is still the odd new CD showing up like this. Considering I have to call it one way or they other then I think my prediction was more correct than it was wrong simply because there were much fewer copy controlled CDs available in 2006 than in 2005.

This gives a ratio of 6 predictions correct vs 2 wrong. That’s exactly 75%. Much better than the 2 out of 6 or 33% I got on my 2005 predictions. I think partly this is because in 2006 I didn’t make any Apple predictions, they’re a hard bunch to predict over the long term. I’m still working on 2007 predictions, I hope I can keep the success rate up but I don’t like to play it safe. Only time will tell I guess.