Mobile media soothsayers continually amaze me with their uncanny ability to predict the future of technology, especially mobile tech after a major show like MWC 2012.
Social media journalists do the same on Twitter and Facebook. Everyone, it seems, has opinions about smartphones and pad computers.
Sometimes you wonder who’s on target and who’s full of hogwash. Like mobile research forecasters–Gartner, Nielsen and comScore–it makes you feel powerful to pontificate about mobile’s growth.
After all, you’ll probably have a new job or die before your prediction happens–or doesn’t.
“I predict that Android OS will power your auto by 2015.” Or the app madness. “Mobile apps will grow ten times faster next year.” Nothing new. Herbert Hoover in the 1928 election promised “a…chicken in every pot…” Then Republicans asked him to include “…and a car in every garage.”
I guess a chicken prediction wasn’t as appealing unless you threw in the car. When the depression hit a year later, though, people probably got neither. They ate oatmeal for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And ran out of gas assuming they had a car. So much for predictions.
As a mobile media blogger,” I wrote a MobileBeyond piece about mobile content in 2036, making fun of other tech bloggers writing today. But If I’m wrong, who’s going to lambast me in 2036, assuming I’m still among the living? After all, I was just one of many mobile media soothsayers
Besides, would anyone in my Google+ circles write nasty 140 character blog posts or launch a video on MeTube about my exaggerations? Send out mobile snippets about my stupidity? Not a chance. Mobile media content will have buried us so much that busy soothsayers wouldn’t have time.
Mobile Media Soothsayers Speak Out
Silicon Republic quoted Eric Schmidt’s smartphone ownership speech at 2012’s MWC.
“For every person online there are two that are not,” Schmidt said “…Today Android smartphones cost [200 U.S. dollars] on average. In a few years time Android smartphones could cost less than $20, [enough to put one] in every pocket on earth. The weak will be made strong and those with nothing will have something,” Schmidt said in his vision of tomorrow.”
Schmidt’s prediction sounds like a Biblical psalm. But who can blame the man, the guy who left Apple’s Board knowing he had a better product called Android.
Googling “mobile media soothsayers” reveals many future tech predictions:
CNET’s Soothsayers Tackle 2012 – Lots to chew on here. See the article.
Intel’s Soothsayers Predict the End of Tablets, Laptops and Netbooks – Tiny smart computers, probably embedded in your body, will take over computing in the next decade. “Rama Skukla, vice president of Intel’s architecture group, said during his keynote address to the SEMICON West conference in San Francisco that ‘tablets are disappearing‘, and that the kind of devices we will be using a decade from now ‘could not be described.'” That’s like saying “I predict Android tablets will look different five years from now but…”
Predictions about consumer technologies and other topics used to come from “experts” trusted by millions. (See my Walter Cronkite post and “Technology Trust as American as Apple Pie.”)
That’s changed. Today, millions of soothsayers and non-experts stand on digital soapboxes spouting forth whatever they want you to think. We believe what we want to believe. And that’s the way it is.