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Non-Tech : Tulipomania Blowoff Contest: Why and When will it end? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stephen O who wrote (485)	1/3/1999 8:50:00 AM
From: Don Pueblo	Respond to of 3543

OK, you two, this is starting to look like flaming. Watch it, OK?

To: Stephen O who wrote (485)	1/3/1999 7:38:00 PM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3543

Someone at ground zero PM'd this to me (second prospect is of relevance): mercurycenter.com What awaits us (maybe) in new year BY DAN GILLMOR Mercury News Technology Columnist PUNDITS are fortunate that Americans have such short attention spans, given the errant predictions regularly leaping from our word processors. Political commentators have had an especially terrible year, but technology pundits have no reason to be smug. It's a snap to make some techno-predictions: Hardware will get smaller, faster and cheaper. Software will get more bloated and buggy. Microsoft will use its operating system monopoly to extract ever-larger profits from customers. Et cetera. But when it comes to the non-obvious, we tend toward whoppers, relying on the velocity of change to shift the audience's attention to something else by the time our guesses are proved laughable or merely misguided. As usual, therefore, I'll forgo prognostications in favor of prospects. Herewith is a non-comprehensive list of things I hope will happen this year. As you'll see, given the probability I've assigned to each of my hopes for 1999, I don't expect them all to go my way. First: A combination of the legal system and marketplace will cause Microsoft Corp. to modify some of its business practices. U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson will rule against Microsoft in the most important antitrust case in a generation, and he'll do it in a way that both forces Microsoft to temper its roughhouse tactics and holds up under the inevitable appeal to the Supreme Court. (Probability of this happening, in the range from zero to one: 0.8) The marketplace will make tentative moves to reassert itself in part because Microsoft's customers will finally begin to understand how this monopoly ultimately threatens their own businesses. (Probability: 0.35) Second: The Internet stock bubble won't burst violently. Rather, it will gradually deflate and give us all a much-needed soft landing. The Net is for real, but reality is the last thing propelling investors' ardor for any company with any remote connection to cyber-commerce. Recognizing the dangers of this kind of mania -- namely a wider crash set off by an Internet-stock crash -- investment bankers will stop taking flaky companies public; brokers will warn off investors who don't understand their peril; and investors will count to 10, very slowly, before jumping into the latest Internet stock. The mania will subside, as will the risk of an overall market crash. (Probability: 0.45) Third: Lawmakers and executive branches in Washington and state capitals will help enable the Information Age by moving strongly to improve online privacy protections. They'll understand the absolute necessity for strong encryption (the scrambling of information to keep it away from prying eyes) in a world where the most private kind of personal information, from medical records to finances, increasingly will move online. (Probability: 0.5) They'll also enact protections for consumers whose personal data is routinely bought and sold by third parties, forcing the data collectors and peddlers to protect privacy, not violate it. (Probability: 0.4) Fourth: The courts will continue to protect online speech from those who would censor the Internet. The latest version of the Communications Decency Act, rewritten and renamed but no less a threat to your right to view and say what you want, will be found unconstitutional. (Probability: 0.6) Fifth: The technology industry's current leaders will make reliability, ease of use and consumer-friendliness their top priorities in developing and marketing new hardware and software. Companies will ship products only after bugs have been found and fixed, rather than using customers as testers. They'll stop charging for technical support when the problem is with the product, not the user. And instead of offering a slew of new features in upgraded products, they'll make the current products easy to use. Meanwhile, deceptive and anti-consumer practices in the technology business will fade into history. Companies will stop making pre-announcements of products that take ages to appear on the market, and they'll stop putting out routinely misleading advertising. They'll cancel the current, cynical campaign to make their take-it-or-leave-it license agreements even more consumer-unfriendly than they are today. (Probability: 0.2) Sixth: High-speed Internet connections to homes and small business will become much easier to get because telephone companies, cable TV companies and an assortment of wireless-communications companies will fight for customers in an area competition has been more of a dream than reality. The phone companies, in particular, will discover that their loathing of genuine competition will only lead to their demise in the long run. They'll get some help from federal and state regulators, who will insist that the local phone monopolies truly open their systems to competitors. (Probability: 0.25) Seventh: Consumers who find PCs a pain in the neck to use and maintain will increasingly flock to ''information appliances,'' devices that do one or two or a few things reliably and easily. Entrepreneurs will connect many of these devices to the Internet, creating a new class of appliances whose utility we can only begin to imagine today. (Probability: 0.65) Eighth: A revolution called ''open source'' will become much more popular in large enterprises and in the consumer market. With open-source software, a variant on free software, the source code programming instructions are freely available to programmers who improve the product and then make their improvements available to the wider community; GNU/Linux and several other Unix-like operating systems are prime examples, and the Internet's basic software plumbing relies on open-source software. IBM and other major companies will offer soup-to-nuts open-source support to their big corporate information-systems customers, who will increasingly realize that it's at least as good as the commercial competition. (Probability: 0.6) Many people have stayed away due to problems with hardware compatibility and ease of use. But in 1999 the worldwide programming community will solve those difficulties, and open-source software will gain much wider sway even on consumer desktops. (Probability: 0.25) Ninth: We'll face up to our year 2000 (Y2K) software problems with a judicious mix of concern and calm, not panic and profiteering. Since we won't know until next Jan. 1 just how much damage Y2K will cause, this year's biggest danger is fear that morphs toward hysteria, in which people put vast amounts of money into mattresses, hoard essential goods, wreck stock markets with panic selling and otherwise make matters worse. Instead, people will exercise caution and prevent their emotions from turning rational concern into disaster. (Probability: 0.8) Tenth: The Boston Red Sox will win the World Series. (Probability: 0.01) Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. Write him (and please include a daytime phone number -- for verification, not publication) at the Mercury News, 750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, Calif. 95190; e-mail: dgillmor@sjmercury.com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917. PGP fingerprint: FE68 46C9 80C9 BC6E 3DD0 BE57 AD49 1487 CEDC 5C14.