Trawling the Archives
One of the things I lost in the move from self-hosted to wordpress.com was my custom snippet post type. It was an attempt to create a Tumblr-esque quick post mechanism, and it worked. But the way the links were stored meant they didn't get exported, so every thing in the snippets category lost its link to the source material and some where just orphaned headlines with no link or description.
So I've manually gone through and added source links and, in many cases, some information about the original article (some made no sense so out of context).
The process of adding the links doing forced me to re-read many of those articles and my predictions and comments and it made some interesting reading, so I thought I would sum a few of them up (some will make it to their own posts).
Tablet Computers
Back in 2008 I posted about the TechCrunch tablet, which evolved, through bitter dispute, into the JooJoo or whatever it was called, and promptly died a death. I think the concept is still valid (a simpler tablet to the iPad) and the iPad has obviously proved we were on to something.
In 2009 I commented on the Apple tablet rumours (which turned out to be accurate) and, rather presciently wrote that I thought:
...tablet PCs are the next growth sector and could replace netbooks
How on the money was I?
Computers in General
There was talk of computers being everywhere at Computex in 2009, but smaller, cheaper, more power-efficient computers haven't really appeared. The Pi is the first in this area I class as game-changing (if they can make enough of them). Now the other manufacturers need to follow suit and with Microsoft (hopefully) supporting ARM architecture soon, it might tip the balance. The next revolution will be all about £20 computers.
I wrote about the desire to cut computer boot times. Made all the worse since then by instant-on tablets and smartphones. SSDs have helped a bit and Windows 8 is also going to be tackling Windows ever-longer boot times, so maybe we'll start to see them come down.
Windows
There was the launch of Chrome OS, back in 2009, with suggestions it sounded the death knell for Windows. I said it wouldn't and we've barely heard any more from Chrome OS.
I was excited about the impending release of Windows 7 (as I am about 8) in 2008. There was talk that Windows 7 had to succeed, which it did, but I didn't think it was essential to Microsoft's success. As big a success as Windows 7 was, I know plenty of people still happily running XP (companies too). The story I linked to called it the 'last OS' and I said no (I wasn't the only one), this wouldn't be the last desktop OS. With Windows 8 just around the corner, history has proved me right.
The Kindle and Digital Books
There was the shock that electronic books accounted for 35% of sales where they were available in 2009, we know ebook sales have gone even higher now.
There was talk of the Vook, a digital amalgam that would replace the book, it didn't, or hasn't, at least yet.
Blio decided the end was in sight for e-readers at the start of 2010, but they're still going strong (and likely to continue I would say).
Meanwhile, discussions of how to beat Amazon and the Kindle have so far proved fruitless (but the ecosystem is the key).
3D
Apparently 2010 was going to be the year of 3D, well, it wasn't, as I correctly predicted. In fact, I don't see major inroads being made for a few years yet, if ever. I'm still to have a good 3D experience.
So an interesting round-up from just one category of posts between 2008 and 2010, it's funny to see how things played out and how off the mark we sometimes were over such a short distance. I'm pretty happy with the number of my predictions that paid out though.