Predictions for 2010

http://erickerr.com/2010-predictions

by treblig • 17 years ago

65 39 17 years ago

Anon84• 17 years ago

     20. Adobe CS5 makes biggest splash in the “Objective-C 
     is hard, here’s another way to make iPhone applications”
     space.

This can be pretty big. Specially if Apple releases the fabled iSlate with an iPhone-like OS (although I hope it's a touch based feline). All the little flash games and apps out there would suddenly become deployable in Apple hardware and Steve Jobs would all of a sudden get a gazilion more developers (for free) to help him push all of his lovely hardware.

cubicle672• 17 years ago

There's still a number of factors this depends on before it becomes big.

I'm guessing how it will work is the iPhone apps will consist of an embedded (in the app) flash platform that just plays the native flash code. This will require Adobe to build a native flash player that doesn't suck

Flash devs have to be willing to get a Mac and pay Apple their $99

I'm guessing (again) that Flash based games won't be able to have the same performance as native ones. The Flash player need to be able to be fast enough for some decent games that people will be willing to pay for

The iPhone UI is quite different from kb + mouse based UI, so most things will require a bit of a rethink regarding how the user interacts

jsz03• 17 years ago

It's interesting the tech media has not covered the fact that Adobe failed to deliver on their promises of a beta of Flash 10 for Android (October) and the Palm Pre ("by the end of the year") Makes me think things aren't going swimmingly behind the scenes at Adobe.

seiji• 17 years ago

Not quite.

Adobe is using LLVM to translate ActionScript into native ARM assembly. No flash needed. See http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html and http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Applications_for_iPhone...

adatta02• 17 years ago

doesn't Adobe all ready have a LLVM backend to target the iPhone from ActionScript3?

maxklein• 17 years ago

I heard the frame-rate is les horrible! 12fps for very simple flash games when running on mobile platforms. Maybe the tablet will run flash better, but I don't really see Apple having much of an interest in enabling this.

mad44• 17 years ago

I like this one: Bonus: RSS faces death as filtered content recommendation systems on social services emerge. They, along with most real-time startups, struggle to find a revenue model (in 2010). People almost get enjoyment out of claiming “RSS Is Dead”. The main problem with completely switching off RSS and on to Twitter is that there is a lot of noise – not to say that RSS isn’t noisy either, but it’s at least generally focused. The complete switch for me will occur when a service can leverage the vast amount of data collected by these social services and curate it in to a personalized feed just for me. Companies and investors are bullish on the real-time space, and I expect to see this service come to light this year. That being said, It is unclear to me that real-time content services have any significant revenue advantages over almost-real-time services. Accordingly, I don’t predict any services will figure out a way to monetize the added value of extreme recency in 2010.

SandB0x2• 17 years ago

I just don't get this. My RSS reader automatically receives articles from sites I like, or subsections of sites I like, and in most cases the entire article is fed through to my browser/phone in a nice readable format. Perfect.

I don't see why it's broken and why we need to reinvent the wheel. Maybe I haven't subscribed to sufficiently noisy feeds. Can someone explain?

DoQrs• 17 years ago

With RSS, you get a deep view at very narrow topics (a full feed by one blog). You can set up filters and whatnot, but it's still a very narrow model.

A more social system leveraging your interests, your peers, and all that other crap could surface good content you might otherwise have never seen, plus the best content you were already seeing. It's a pipe dream, but I imagine that a service will figure it out sooner rather than later. As I mention in the article, whether or not they actually manage to make money remains to be seen.

thwarted• 17 years ago

I don't understand why anyone expects RSS, the transport and encoding format, to contain filters, recommendations, and social aspects. Where do you think all those people who post (shortened) links on twitter get them from? Visiting all the websites by hand? How many of them are retweeted without actual having visited the site and read/consumed the content? Can sub-140 characters contain enough information to allow the next level of filtering, social or otherwise, to be really effective?

icefox• 17 years ago

There are two rss readers 1) Feeds of slashdot and 500 other urls leading to 10,000 "news" items a day.

These stories are stuff you would like to read, not that you must read. This might die as it is just overwhelming and it will be replaced with filtered/recommended content.

2) Specific feeds of items that don't come up that often or don't have that much content where every post must be read.

This will never die. This is extremely valuable. Subscribing to a blog where the author posts every six months, subscribing to information about a bill going through congress, subscribing to a feed telling you whenever someone assigns a bug to you, a feed notifying you when someone posts a FooBar up on ebay (once every 8 years). Whenever you want to get notified about something and you will read every story rss is extremely good. The alternatives are you manually checking (time waste) or email (spam heaven).

nir2• 17 years ago

RSS is infrastructure. It doesn't die. RSS readers as we know them might go away, but RSS readers are just a way to consume it, probably not even the best one.

RSS will likely stick around for quite a while, transparently powering features & products that's don't have "RSS" anywhere in their name.

blasdel2• 17 years ago

Or "RSS" anywhere in their implementation! Dave Winer poisoned that well quite thoroughly: everyone else produces Atom by default (or exclusively), and his products (which only he uses) are the only ones that don't consume Atom. Feedburner automatically uses older formats for known-shitty clients all from one URL.

10ren• 17 years ago

A few of these are predicated on an improved economy, which is probably right.

bugs• 17 years ago

Are Dropbox and GitHub wanting to get acquired?

pjhyett• 17 years ago

We have no reason to sell GitHub, the business is doing very well and we're all having a great time.

onewland2• 17 years ago

How about for $500m?

Not saying that's what would be offered, just noting that there is probably a monetary threshold where "having a great time" no longer is relevant.

cmelbye2• 17 years ago

The Droid is hands-down the best non-iPhone phone on the market.

Huh? I just tried the Droid tonight at the Verizon kiosk, and I found it slow and confusing. HTC Sense on the HTC Hero is better by leaps and bounds.

alexgartrell• 17 years ago

the Samsung moment has all of the features of the droid (including a superior slide out keyboard). I love mine and haven't had any battery life complaints.

cmelbye2• 17 years ago

Yeah, that's just it. The Droid is pretty much a stock Android device if I'm understanding correctly. HTC has actually created a slick, usable, and fast interface for the phone, and that's a key feature in my mind.

ramchip2• 17 years ago

Now let me put on my troll face for a minute.

My Sharp SH001 has an autofocus 8.0MP camera, GPS, TV receiver, microSD card port, flashlight, bluetooth, infrared emitter/receiver, internet & emails (via cellphone network), built-in japanese & english OCR and QR code reader and misc apps (GPS maps, train planner, dictionary, banking, alarm, calendar, etc). Of course it can play music/videos, install apps and do what a phone does. All that for a flexible contract (costs me 15$-20$ per month, I email a lot, do a little internet, but almost never call) for 2 years and the phone itself is free.

Sure, there's no WiFi and the user interface is sometimes frustrating. But I'm not impressed by the iPhone. What makes it so great? The usable interface and the app market?

Sorry for the trollish post. I have a hard time understanding the hype for some american phones when a generic, free phone in Asia has better specs and decent design. Why don't they import them back home? :/

jsz03• 17 years ago

Mostly the UI and App Store but more importantly Apple has done a huge amount of advertising which serves to educate consumers on why they might want a SmartPhone. They show really compelling & practical uses for the iPhone. They show off impressive games. They show how easy it is to use. I kind of feel like the average consumer may not even be aware other phones offer similar features at this point. Apple just leaped out ahead on marketing SmartPhones to a wider market. Meanwhile their competition is spending their money on weird ads like the Palm Pre & Droid marketing campaign that don't bother showing off the device/software much at all.

onewland2• 17 years ago

I do not own a smart phone, and I think your position is basically reasonable. That said:

"Sure, there's no WiFi" to me is actually a complete deal killer. Even in areas with great 3G reception, I would always prefer to be using WiFi. You say yourself that you rarely use the phone functionality. That means that, of the functionality you use most, you can't do it as well as an iPhone. Maybe you'd be doing more than "a little" internet if your phone supported WiFi.

This is characteristic to me of the philosophical divide between Mac and PC users (I'm actually not allied with either one). PC users just don't expect things to be perfect, but they expect any feature they want, and they're not disappointed with a lackluster UI or faulty design decisions like a lack of WiFi. Mac users are OK with limiting functionality, so long as what is included is designed well and comprehensively (here I mean interconnected components work well together).

With phones, it seems people value that design more than computers. You can't take apart a phone and fix its problems. For the most part, you can't download hacks to sidestep poor design decisions. If you have the "Mac" mindset, everything else seems like death by a thousand paper cuts.

dagw• 17 years ago

For the vast majority of users (ie people who aren't tech geeks) usable interface trumps all. Look at all the features missing on the first iPhone, and it still sold like hot cakes simply because of its interface.

joshu• 17 years ago

I just got a Droid recently. I'm reasonably happy with it (I was die-hard Blackberry user.) I am thrilled with the Verizon network coverage etc. The software has rough edges in places but feels like it's moving pretty quickly.

Disclosure, I work at Google. Not on Android, though.

icode• 17 years ago

All of these predictions are so vague, one will never be able to judge if they are right or wrong.

jsz03• 17 years ago

AT&T/Verizon/Apple: Apple's affections change quickly. In a span of about 8 months we had Jobs cracking jokes on Intel to Paul Otellini on stage in a bunny costume at an Apple event. If Verizon & Apple cannot reach a deal I suspect we'll see the CDMA iPhone on Sprint instead. Is there anything Sprint wouldn't do to get the iPhone?

_3ex7• 17 years ago

> 10. Square realizes its bottleneck is additional hardware, so it gives card reader away for free.

Isn't this what PayPal was originally trying to do back in the day? Interesting concept.

Predictions for 2010

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