Ensight – Jeremy Wright

Every year I try and make a set of predictions. My review of my 2004 predictions gave me an overall score of “0″ for “1 completely right. 1 completely wrong. 2 vaguely right / wrong.”

For 2005 I decided to up the ante and make 10 predictions across a number of markets. Here they are, here’s how I did, and here’s my scoring for this year.

Prediction: Microsoft will not release Longhorn.
Result: Okay, looking back this seems like a given, but in 2004 Microsoft was still hinting that a staggered 2005 release was possible. I don’t really deserve a full point for this, but I did get it right in spite of rumours to the contrary.
Score: +1 for moi.

Prediction: Google will make mistakes, lose the “halo” and stock will shrink to IPO levels.
Result: While Google made lots of mistakes and decidedly lost its “halo”, the stock didn’t shrink. I still believe that’ll happen, but I was likely compressing too much foretelling into too small of a period of time.
Score: +1 for calling the missteps. -1 for missing it on the stock price. Overall adjustment is 0 for a total score of +1.

Prediction: Sun will open source Solaris, putting pressure on Novell.
Result: Bang on. Sun open source’d Solaris which, again, wasn’t a for sure at all at the end of 2004 in spite of strong hints. Pressure was definitely on Novell to step up.
Score: Ding ding ding! I should get 2 points for this, but I’ll only take 1 for a total of 2 points. I’m on a roll baby!

Prediction: Novell won’t step up or make a significant impact on the market.
Result: The only ways Novell really stepped up was in their continuing great marketing and in continuing to open source technologies. I’m still not convinced that’s a great strategy for them, as their company really doesn’t differentiate in enough areas make the strategy make sense. Especially since the products they are open sourcing are some of their unique ones.
Score: Knock another one back for the champ, this puts my total score at 3, which is craziness I tell you!

Prediction: Apple will continue to dominate the music player market, though share will drop to 75%.
Result: Okay, this one was a given. Nobody thought the WMP-based players would really start dominating this year. I felt that moves like Napsters subscription model and cloned services (like Yahoo’s recently released one) would make a dent. And they did. The actual metric is between 75-80%.
Score: I’ll take a half-point on this. At the end of 2004, Apple owned more than 90% of the market. Dropping 15-20% is a huge drop, but not enough to earn me a full point. Total score: 3.5.

Prediction: Xbox 360 will be released. Great graphics, okay games, not enough to take a serious lead.
Result: At the time, I’d expected the 360 in the earlier fall, like October. I didn’t publish that, though, so I won’t take a hit on it. My prediction was bang on. I still expect the 360 and the PS3 to go head-to-head, but considering that the PS3 likely won’t be out in north america until 1-3 months before Christmas I don’t see the real head-to-head happening until 2007.
Score: +1 for getting everything that mattered right (release date of both consoles, performance of the 360 more than 6 months before any real screens were announced and the classic “not enough great games” syndrome that almost every console suffers from). Total score: 4.5.

Prediction: Storage market will consolidate. No major moves in centralized or virtual storage by the big boys.
Result: I’ll be honest, I haven’t been following this as much since I quit my job in the enterprise arena. I had to call up some friends to confirm that while virtualized, centralized and decentralized storage are gaining appeal in the niche markets, most of the major players aren’t offering them as part of their big-name products.
Score: I’ll take a +.5 for this, mainly because I don’t have enough knowledge of the industry to know if I really nailed this or not. Total score is 5. I should work on predicting lottery results

Prediction: 3 surprise hit movies this year.
Result: It’s hard to remember, looking back. But, Narnia and King Kong were surprises in terms of how good they were. Mr & Mrs Smith was also surprisingly good. Some movies were surprisingly bad.
Score: While I nailed the prediction, I really don’t feel it’s a long shot to say that 3 surprise hit movies in a year is, well, surprising. Again, I’ll only take half a point for basically gaming this call. Total score is 5.5.

Prediction: Several blogging books released. Companies really start to jump on the blogging bandwagon. Bloggers make some key mistakes and the “halo” comes off of blogging.
Result: I just about nailed this. Several blogging books were released, but in late 2004 (before actually signing any contracts), I’d expected at least 2-3 to be out. I hadn’t realized that it takes about 4-6 months from when the book is written until when it’s on shelves, though, which is why the other books are actually in January-March.
Score: I missed the date, but nailed everything else. Still, I won’t take any points for this, even though I feel it was quite prescient of me. In some ways it was obvious this was coming, even if it wasn’t 100% clear at the end of 2004.

Prediction: I “get some”.
Result: Well, yeah. This was a given
Score: I won’t take any points for this either, since it was totally a given

My total overall score was a, to me, quite impressive 5.5. I really only got a few points wrong, and most of those were to do with timing. Still, it was quite a huge year for business, IT, entertainment and blogging and it’s nice to look back on it.

I’ll have my predictions for 2006 in the next few weeks.