> JulianMorrison on Jan 1, 2010: Ubiquitous mobile/wireless internet integrated into even very trivial consumer goods, with close to 100% coverage across the civilized world. A significant fraction of ordinary consumer goods simply won't work in "dark" zones. The gap between 1st and 3rd world countries will widen as a result - take a modern computer into backwoods Africa and it's a paperweight.
It's not wrong. But I guess he didn't foresee the Internet of Useless Shit. It matters if you tablet doesn't work without Internet, but doesn't matter if it's your refrigerator, or so we hope.
> Electric cars become fairly common. A destructive feedback loop starts for gasoline fuel: lower demand, lower profit, vendors go bust, less availability, monopoly prices, lower desirability. The gasoline economy is brittle because it has high fixed costs, a complex supply chain, and its power source isn't fungible. As with film versus digital cameras, the result is an exponential crash in the desirability of gasoline cars
Exponential crash? Didn't see it yet.
> Driverless cars will appear. As they move down from the high end to the mainstream, they'll make taxis cheap enough that private car ownership starts to become quaint. Eventually, driving your own car will be considered selfish risk-taking, and banned on public roads.
Not yet.
> DrJokepu on Jan 1, 2010: Still no fusion power.
Haha!
> During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst. This will be a quite heavy shock. A lot of people will lose a lot of money. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.
The unsustainable early economic growth has came to an end and there was an economic crisis, but there was never a major "burst". And the power was not assumed by a younger group, but a more conservative group. Not sure if's populist or not though.
> Hugo Chavez & his friends will be removed from power in Venezuela.
Still not completely fulfilled, but probably soon.
> Google will experience change in management. From there, it will be downhill for them (at least for the rest of the decade).
Accurate?
> Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.
Accurate!
> adw on Jan 1, 2010: Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp. That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.
Accurate.
> jacquesm on Jan 1, 2010: [...] the end of 32 bit computing for consumer pcs and server platforms. So all mainstream machines not being mobile or embedded devices will be 64 bits by the end of the decade (and plenty of those will be too, but you are right, not all of them).
Accurate.
> artagnon on Jan 1, 2010: [...] 3. By 2020, Chrome and Firefox each have 35% market share. Internet Explorer becomes insignificant.
It's wrong, it's more like Chrome has 66% and Firefox has 33% (just an example, the "real" number shows Firefox's market share is even less than that). While the death of Internet Explorer was certain, it was hard to imagine that Google Chrome would be a monopoly.