2004 prediction result list
Last year, I made a list of technology predictions for 2004. Since this is the last day of 2004, let’s see how I did.
Prediction 1: We won’t see a usable desktop Linux
I actually haven’t gotten around to playing much with Novell Desktop Linux yet — but from what I have seen, Novell is getting there.
0.5 points.
Prediction 2: MSIE will remain the dominant desktop-based rendering engine
Internet Explorer still is the dominant browser — I don’t have to like it. Opera users don’t have to like it. Firefox users don’t have to like it. It still is a fact though.
1 point
Prediction 3: Search engines will remain fundamentally user-unfriendly.
While everyone else seems to think that Google Suggest is the new black, I don’t neccesarily agree. Sure: It’s a step in the right direction. XMLHTTPRequest and related technologies is a way forward — but we aren’t there yet.
Message to Google: Please, please, pretty please, buy IceRocket — as they are offering some real innovation:
- Result thumbnails
- Quick view, where you can open the search result in the result list.
- If you’re an IE user, you can add results to your bookmarks
- Search results RSS
- Blogs search
- Phone picture search
And, again, Google: Please, pretty please implement dynamic search results. Use that XMLHTTPRequest goodness to do something like the sitesearch here does.
Look at this search — it returns hundreds of results. Notice the little “Narrow your search” with an adjacent input field that pops up if you use Opera or Firefox. Try typing something into that box, like “Google”, and see what happens? It filters your results. Google, are you listening? Steal the idea, steal the code behind it if you like, but pretty, pretty please implement it.
0.6 points. 0.3 deducted for IceRocket, and the last 0.1 for Google suggest.
Prediction 4: Google will not index Atom/RSS-feeds.
Sure, Google crawls my feeds, and they can be found, if you search specifically for the appropriate file extension. The items aren’t indexed, though. This is status quo since I made my prediction.
1 point.
Prediction 5: Spam won’t go away. Neither will the morons who keep the spammers alive
1 point. ‘Nuff said. I’m happy that spam doesn’t bother me anymore, I don’t have any illusions that spam became any less of a problem.
Prediction 6: SCO won’t go away
Ok. For the longest time, the legal standstill made it seem like I was going to be wrong regarding this. There were even some encouraging news regarding the SCO share — but alas, on Christmas Day, it was known that SCO will continue their extortion tactics
Message to SCO: Go away! You’re attempting to do harm to an entire industry
1 point
Total score
- Max: 6
- My score: 4.1
Comments
Comment from Jan Egil Kristiansen on 2005-01-03 10:24
Somebody else buy IceRocket, please. Big players don’t buy innovative technology to use it, they buy to get rid of dangerous competition.
I’d rather see a search underdog with lots of money, maybe Microsoft, as owner of IceRocket.
Comment from Jarle on 2005-01-03 23:10
Jan Egil, I don’t agree. Percentage wise Google has the upper hand in actually using technology they buy over Microsoft.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft is the one using stragegies such as “buy innovative technology to get rid of dangerous competition”.
Comment from Chris Hester on 2005-01-04 13:50
Why should Google index feeds? Think about it. They are either temporary announcements, likely to disappear altogether in a few weeks, or copies of posts already available on a site. Hence Google would merely be copying the data. Plus if it archived it, the links would fail to work after a short time.
Comment from Arve on 2005-01-05 17:09
Chris, I see that my wording may have been somewhat unclear:
What I want Google to do, is allow me to search in RSS/Atom sources only, so that the list of the returned results is the excerpts and links gathered from feeds only. Much like IceRocket or Feedster allows.
Comment from Chris Hester on 2005-01-05 17:42
But to do this, Google must first archive the feeds. See?
Comment from Arve on 2005-01-05 17:54
Chris: Google are already caching everything they are fetching.
Whether they are also keeping every revision of documents fetched, is however unknown.
Comment from Jan Egil Kristiansen on 2005-01-10 12:00
Jarle: I think we both agree that Microsoft has the worst track record in the world, when it comes to buying technology to kill it.
But you can only do that when you are a market leader. And when it comes to search, the one and only leader is Google, not MS.
I just wonder: Why does Google base its local search n ZIP codes, rather than geotags of some sort? Granted: nobody use geotags now, but that would change within a week, if Google announced support for them.
My conspiracy theory: Google prefers ZIP over geotags because they are more difficult to search. If Google encouraged geotags, that would make it easier for some lightweight newcomer to give them a run for their money.
(I’m old enough to remember who we hated before M$)
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