January 7, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 1
Page(s) 22 in print issue
There is nothing that makes me feel older than a few days with my grandkids. My daughter and her children (Mary, 4, and Katie, 18 months) came for the holidays. They just left, and the house has returned to the deafening quiet that I seem to enjoy. Now I don't have to carefully navigate through the 4,000 plastic toys like a soldier feeling his way through a minefield at night in his bare feet.
The really sad part of this Christmas was that virtually everything we gave and got was made in China, Taiwan, or elsewhere in the Far East. Actually, that's not entirely true. I did get a cool video game (a relic WWII game that simulates German U-Boats) that was designed, coded, and built in Austin, Texas, but run by a company (Ubisoft) that is headquartered in France. My wife also crocheted some nice scarves—with Italian and American yarn. But the Christmas tree, lights, and most of the decorations were made in China. It's clear we live in a pretty "global" economy that depends quite heavily on imports—perhaps too heavily.
Looking To 2005
But I want to try to make some new year's predictions—a first for me. No, I don't have any more insight than any of the other prognosticators out there, but I expect my predictions will be as accurate as theirs. Although I would like to predict that we will no longer be at war with the "insurgents" in Iraq, I'd rather not wade into another minefield. Instead, I'll try to stick to technology.
• I see more and more technology companies merging. I expect that HP and Dell, HP and Gateway, or Dell and Gateway will merge. Perhaps DellWay will emerge as a new competitor to Lenovo? Will this mean lower prices for consumers? I doubt it, but I'm an optimist. I was planning to buy rights to DellWay.com, but someone beat me to it. Perhaps they know something I don't. . . .
• I expect that more consumer PC systems will be built with overpriced proprietary parts, much like the last HP I tried to repair for a lady in the church choir. Apple has done OK with this strategy, but it means when your PC power supply goes out, you'll have to fork over $90 instead of $15 to bring it back to life. I gave up trying to recycle old Dell and HP system boxes because the standard motherboards don't fit them. I guess more and more of them will end up on the scrap heaps in China, polluting the groundwater. With a one-year warranty, it's often cheaper to toss the computer or printer than trying to get it fixed after the warranty is up.
• I expect the trend to outsource support, coding, and assembly to Russia, India, and China, along with their trade secrets, (once) proprietary designs, and intellectual property, will continue. I wish it wouldn't. I would rather companies send the work to Mexico or Canada where the language difference isn't such an issue and the piracy rates are below 95%. But, as many of us have discovered, it's not just the language difference; it's also the attitude. Most (but not all) of the folks I have had to deal with overseas just don't seem to give a care one bit about customer service—throughput is what matters most to them, it seems.
• I also expect more companies will rebuild local support sites for their "best" customers, the ones they actually want to keep. Eventually, companies discover that it costs a small fortune to win a customer but 10 times more to get the customer back after they have been driven away by poor service.
• I expect Microsoft will finally ship Whidbey and Yukon—albeit four months late, which will drive the marketing people, authors, publishers, and the developer community crazy. We'll find that C# will have even more new features not available in Visual Basic .NET (if they still call it that). Microsoft will change the name of ADO.NET back to XDO to keep developers guessing. We won't see Longhorn this year, but Microsoft will announce another delayed ship date for it and will (doubtless) drop another big feature (like printing or the color red).
• Microsoft will further distance itself from .NET, "Active" anything, and all acronyms not containing an X. Microsoft will also cancel its plans to buy Argentina with the money left over after the dividend payoff. It might, however, buy the city of Bangalore or that piece of land in British Columbia near Vancouver for its new headquarters.
We'll check back next year at this time to see if any of these predictions have, in fact, come true.