predictions

The Stock Market is about to crash, soon. If you think that this won’t affect the mini tech bubble, get ready for your adsense revenues to halve in the six months following. I suspect, however, that this crash will be bad enough to make things like that mere ‘trifles’. FSU Editorial: “2007 Market Crash” by Greg Silberman 07/26/2007

Web businesses will succeed based upon their competitive advantage in acquisition of the finite resource of attention. The quantitative measure of this will be the cost per bit, where the cost is the acquisition cost per user divided by the amount of time and therefore the number of potential transmittable ‘bits’ the users’ attention is captured for. Traditional economics is based upon the notion of scarcity. But this scarcity tends to be relevant only in the production, not the consumption of things. This is because the cost per unit of consumable energy, or more generally, information – the bits consumed per bit delivered is usually very high. As an example, the number of bits of information in the atoms that make up a book is much higher than the atoms that store the book in digital form on a computer. Because of this, the cost of duplicating a computer file…

Not if, but when, will Google be bigger than Microsoft? Google has grown 400% over the last 3ish years, while Microsoft has basically flatlined. If the current trend continues, then Google will be bigger than Microsoft before the end of 2008. In many ways that doesn’t seem unrealistic – Microsoft may be more like IBM and Google more like the fictitious Tyrell corp. Some other interesting things have happened in the tech rebound. Apple, which is less than half the size of Google, is now worth more than the entire gaggle of Internet behemoths other than Google (Amazon, Ebay and Yahoo), put together. And some things haven’t changed. Oracle is also worth about the same as Amazon, Ebay and Yahoo. Since Web2.0 largely runs on open source DBMS unlike the original Oracle powered dotcoms, this might come as some surprise. But one can never underestimate the value of enterprise and…

It may or may not be a good idea for Microsoft to buy Yahoo, but that almost doesn’t matter. Its inevitable that they have to. Om has a poll running:

Here’s an idea that has been bugging me for a while: what if the Tit for Tat game theory strategy is not successful in the real world, ever? Here’s why – Tit for Tat works because it creates a (technically unstable) equilibrium. In models of reward/retribution between two players Tit for Tat is always the best option. But we know that in the real world there are rarely two systems that are isolated, and grievances are normally propagated down generations when retribution is against a different individual that has been strereo-typed as having similar characteristics. This creates a potentially infinite cycle of violence, even when Tit for Tat is used as a strategy by every actor. I believe this could be modeled very simply by creating a 3 party risk/reward game where a certain percentage of plays from a -> b would randomly affect party c (but the players would…

2006 Predictions 1. US loses control of middle east foreign policy. Israel says will use Nuclear tipped warheads to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, unless the US attacks. Saudi Arabia says will invade Iraq to protect Sunni Iraqis if the US pulls out. The president has a mandate for neither of the options allowed to him, domestically. 2. Recession signs. Weather related losses, over leveraged debt, house price declines a weak dollar and middle east political instability. The sooner the inevitable recession comes, the quicker and milder it will be, 2007 if we are lucky, but probably 2008. 3. Global warming hits reinsurance. Insurance has traditionally been a guaranteed money maker, you asses the risk and take a premium while the government pays to mitigate much of that risk, with things like the police and fire services and the military. But the weather is different, and the weather will play a…

The Apple Revolution. Hasta la Vista Microsoft. JMP securities suggest that Microsoft may lose Windows Vista users to OSX. How could an operating system, such as OSX, with such a tiny market share gain dominance without a fundamental change in computers as big as the one that replaced mini computers with desktop PCs? There is an elephant in the room. The change has already happened and people just haven’t noticed. The elephant is the laptop. Laptops have been around for ages, but several factors, have recently conspired to make them the primary computing tool. The reason this is fundamentally different is that a laptop is a very personal thing, its as different a computer as a PC was to a room sized Vax. A laptop is a truly personal computer, one that connects to business data when needed, but which should naturally be yours. You may not own your office…

Table of inflation adjusted (dec 2005 prices) oil prices. Today’s shutdown of the US’s biggest and most geopolitically stable oil source puts oil at $77 a barrel. It is still more than 10% cheaper than in 1980 – but the climate and the political climate is much more unstable. At this point, a recession is innevitable, and is probably the least of our worries for anyone who has read a history book.

Last Year’s predictions. Technology: 1. Digg gets acquired. 2. Google releases Google Calendar and Google Micropayments and OEMs Google maps as a UI for portable iPod like GPS handhelds. Click spam becomes a real worry. 3. Microsoft does a $10billion plus acquisition. 4. Apple takes on Tivo with a Mac Mini style product with Front Row built in. 5. Energy scares and middle east politics dampen the economy such that 2006 is not like 1999 for Web 2.0. Not technology: 6. US switches foreign policy away from direct military involvement to insurgency funding in Venezuela and ups anti-Chavez rhetoric. 7. Castro dies and Chavez threatens to stick his nose into Cuba. 8. Cracks appear in the Saud’s control over Arabia and information leaks suggesting that Ghawar oil field is water logged. 9. Natural gas prices spiral, US house prices cool and plans for renewed US nuclear power push are drawn…

When IBM approached little Microsoft to supply them with an OS to service a market for computers that individuals owned, they did not see the lock in that would mean that Microsoft would soon be telling IBM what to do. The combined hubris and stupidity of the record labels is repeating this game of switch with Apple. The music guys thought that they could test the waters with electronic delivery with an also ran like Apple and use tight DRM to make sure that they weren’t fueling the file sharing networks. As this excellent piece in brainwash points out, AFF’s Brainwash :: The recording industry’s new clothes, they have created the Microsoft of music. Apple now owns the customer, even if you have most of your music as MP3s on an iPod but a few songs you have bought from the iTunes music store, you have a real dollar value…

Ten years ago, I started a design company and our biggest client was Levis. Levis were trendy and they fed the trend by sposoring DJs and independent record labels and bands. We got the gig for Levis, in fact, because my business partner knew the manager of Massive Attack and Levis were involved in promoting Massive Attack’s climb to fame. Five years Later, when I moved to the US, Levis was in the process of a big fall from grace – and the business guys blamed it on late outsourcing and bad design. Last month, I noticed that a few trendy people were wearing Levis in NY, in an almost ironic anti-fashion way. A bit like the daft Trucker Hat fad. When New York bounced back from its 70’s ‘Taxi Driver’ nadir, Giuliani was given credit for its revival, people proposed all sorts of theories, such as a trickle up…