Without further ado, here are my predictions for the new year!!! What do you think?
- We will see major financial problems begin to take shape at hardware companies without a solid cloud strategy.
- Trump’s new offshore tax rules will bring a flood of cash to tech companies – much of this will be shared via dividends and buybacks but it will also find its way into M&A as well as new product development.
- Smart factories with low cost energy will make the US a major force in manufacturing but this prediction will need to take 10 years to play out and thanks to IoT and robotics, the factory of tomorrow will need 1/10th the workers of today.
- Chinese cell phone provider Huawei or Xiaomi will become a serious thorn in the side of Samsung – producing low cost phones for hundreds less than the Korean maker and selling them in large numbers outside China. Samsung will lose a lot of U.S. market share as a result.
- Google, buoyed by the success of its Pixel phone will invest a lot more into hardware which we might not see ’till 2018 but we’ll hear the rumors in the summer/fall of 2017.
- Foxconn will become even bigger as companies use them instead of directly moving manufacturing jobs overseas. They will provide a Trump-friendly way of getting around offshoring manufacturing.
- Energy prices in the US will plummet and green energy will go through a major trough of despair. This will present problems for Tesla.
- Towards the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, the 4K monitor will become a far more common fixture on desks.
- Goodbye net neutrality – we hardly knew you. Instead of forcing carriers to carry outside traffic at high priority for free, a Trump FCC will be more concerned about how many jobs will be created by the carriers who will promise jobs in return for gutting net neutrality.
- The AT&T/Time Warner acquisition will go through as the Trump administration gets Ma Bell to promise to keep jobs in the US and/or add more.
- US tech companies (among others) will be in the crosshairs of countries looking at the tariffs the U.S. imposes on it’s imports.
- The dollar will continue to strengthen and interest rates will continue to rise.
- Apple will buy the Ring video doorbell and my old pal Jamie Siminoff will launch yet another successful startup 12-18 months later.
- HD voice interop will get real… Finally allowing you to make HD calls from one wireless carrier to just about any other.
- GSMA RCS or Rich Communications Service will finally become a real thing in the US, allowing carriers to offer services like Facebook Messenger but these communications service providers will have a tough time competing with Silicon Valley.
- NFV or Network Functions Virtualization will become more popular in the U.S. – success stories will spread and even more carriers will adopt it. Carriers will also realize they are going from hardware lock-in to software lock-in and now pay higher maintenance costs – perhaps as high as 25%.
- All carriers will be forced to purchase media companies in order to compete with AT&T/Verizon.
- Apple will make real progress with new iPads in the hopes of the new devices getting the tablet market to grow again
- Apple’s third-gen smart watch is the one you’ve been waiting for – it will likely be a must have for serious wearable tech enthusiasts.
- Microsoft will continue to out-cool Apple with more products like Surface Studio. They will release an amazing Surface Phone but it will be really tough for them to gain traction against Android and Apple.
- Someone acquires Twitter as it continues to replace the news media for unbiased communications between the President and the public.
- Obamacare is replaced by a unique algorithm matching patients to doctors like TripAdvisor matches travelers to hotels.
- Self-driving everything becomes a major cause of unemployment.
- The retail sector spends billions to match Amazon’s worker-free store of the future.
- Jet.com becomes a major force competing with Amazon after Walmart makes major investments in the company which it now owns.
- Someone (Apple, Google or Amazon) one-ups AT&T’s DirectTV Now with a service which includes DVR and works well – millions cancel cable as a result.
- Low-cost energy means the pressure on the tech industry to reduce energy consumption will be paused. This will hurt ARM but help Intel.
- Car keys will be replaced by phones with bluetooth.
- The auto insurance industry will see reduced accidents thanks to self-driving/parking vehicles and will step in to incentivize consumers and businesses to buy vehicles with these features.
- The sharing economy will extend to spouses allowing you to “rent” one for periods of time without the hassles of divorce and losing ½ your assets.
- The smart-home will take shape, with new standards allowing cameras to interop with security, lighting, motion sensors, entertainment, music, etc.
- Hackers will hack a smart-city, scaring the living daylights (no pun intended) out of the global media and governments.
- The last remnants of privacy go up in smoke as virtually all companies and government agencies seem to be getting hacked at will.
- The encryption battle between Silicon Valley and US Government gets far worse as more iPhones used by terrorists are deemed unbreakable by law enforcement.
- It is discovered that some secure messaging apps are actually authored by government spy agencies.
- Italy or France (both?) break(s) away from the EU, sealing the fate of this failed union experiment.
- 2-5% of our population will be lost to VR – like people are lost to drugs or alcohol. This number will grow by a few percent a year and max out at 15-20% of our population unable to function outside of their VR cocoons.