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- We will see major financial problems begin to take shape at hardware companies without a solid cloud strategy.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- Foxconn will become even bigger as companies use them<\/a> instead of directly moving manufacturing jobs overseas. They will provide a Trump-friendly way of getting around offshoring manufacturing.<\/li>\n
- Energy prices in the US will plummet and green energy will go through a major trough of despair<\/a>. This will present problems for Tesla.<\/li>\n
- Towards the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, the 4K monitor will become a far more common fixture on desks.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- US tech companies (among others) will be in the crosshairs of countries looking at the tariffs the U.S. imposes on it’s imports.<\/li>\n
- The dollar will continue to strengthen and interest rates will continue to rise.<\/li>\n
- Apple will buy the Ring video doorbell and my old pal Jamie Siminoff will launch yet another successful startup 12-18 months later.<\/li>\n
- HD voice interop will get real… Finally allowing you to make HD calls from one wireless carrier to just about any other.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- 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%.<\/li>\n
- All carriers will be forced to purchase media companies in order to compete with AT&T\/Verizon.<\/li>\n
- Apple will make real progress with new iPads in the hopes of the new devices getting the tablet market to grow again<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- Someone acquires Twitter as it continues to replace the news media for unbiased communications between the President and the public.<\/li>\n
- Obamacare is replaced by a unique algorithm<\/a> matching patients to doctors like TripAdvisor matches travelers to hotels.<\/li>\n
- Self-driving everything becomes a major cause of unemployment.<\/li>\n
- The retail sector spends billions to match Amazon’s worker-free store of the future<\/a>.<\/li>\n
- Jet.com becomes a major force competing with Amazon after Walmart makes major investments in the company which it now owns.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- Low-cost energy means the pressure on the tech industry to reduce energy consumption will be paused. This will hurt ARM but help Intel.<\/li>\n
- Car keys will be replaced by phones with bluetooth.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n
- The smart-home will take shape, with new standards allowing cameras to interop with security, lighting, motion sensors, entertainment, music, etc.<\/li>\n
- Hackers will hack a smart-city, scaring the living daylights (no pun intended) out of the global media and governments.<\/li>\n
- The last remnants of privacy go up in smoke as virtually all companies and government agencies seem to be getting hacked at will.<\/li>\n
- The encryption battle between Silicon Valley and US Government gets far worse as more iPhones used by terrorists are deemed unbreakable by law enforcement.<\/li>\n
- It is discovered that some secure messaging apps are actually authored by government spy agencies.<\/li>\n
- Italy or France (both?) break(s) away from the EU, sealing the fate of this failed union experiment.<\/li>\n
- 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,157,169,158,168,171,160,212,199,1677,188,164,211,118,177,174,190,191,208,175],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12463"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18448,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12463\/revisions\/18448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- Energy prices in the US will plummet and green energy will go through a major trough of despair<\/a>. This will present problems for Tesla.<\/li>\n