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2011 prediction #5: Facebook forks

Facebook now claims more than 500 million members. Facebook is too big. Already we’re seeing Facebook defections by, well, me. And others, there are other people than me who are put-off by the simple fact that this social network is becoming as ubiquitous as bad breath in dogs.

LinkedIn, at only 80 million members, is already having success with its branding as the working professional’s Facebook. Well the real Facebook can’t allow that, can they?

So expect this year a Facebook fork with the social network offering premium services to get back all those high earners over at LinkedIn. We may see several Facebook channels in fact. How else can Zuckerberg appeal to those of us who, like Groucho Marx, “refuse to join any club that […]

By Robert X. Cringely|January 4th, 2011|2011|28 Comments

2011 prediction #4: Bufferbloat may be terrible, but your cable ISP won’t fix it

As explained ad nauseam in prediction #1, bufferbloat is going to be a growing problem this year as Windows XP machines are replaced and more people are downloading Internet video. But terrible latency, jitter, and dropouts may not be all bad if you are a cable ISP. That’s because cable ISPs are first and foremost cable television providers and the main victims of bufferbloat are video services like Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube that have become the natural enemies of cable TV. Cable video-on-demand services, while also digital, use separately-provisioned bandwidth and sometimes even different signaling technology, so the ISP’s competitor to Netflix isn’t bothered by bufferbloat at all.

Bufferbloat also affects BitTorrent, which ISPs hate, though they’d hate it a lot less if they’d eliminate […]

By Robert X. Cringely|January 4th, 2011|2011|28 Comments

2011 prediction #3: 1.8-inch and 3.5-inch disk drives will die

This year will see the end of the iPod Classic and with it the 1.8-inch disk drive, 90 percent of which are sold by Toshiba. This is a testament to the rise of flash memory and Solid State Disk (SSD) drives, but that’s not the only cause or the only result, because I predict that late in the year the venerable 3.5-inch disk form factor will hit end-of-life, too.

Apple is by far the largest consumer of 1.8-inch disk drives with most of the rest going into competing media players and netbooks. Toshiba might be able to keep its 1.8-inch disk business going to serve those alternate markets but I don’t think Apple will allow it, […]

By Robert X. Cringely|January 4th, 2011|2011|52 Comments

2011 Prediction #2: The white iPhone IS the Verizon iPhone

No other explanation makes any sense.

Certainly there is no supply problem that could keep Apple from introducing a white iPhone. But what if white is a Verizon exclusive in the USA? That would to a certain extent pull the branding rug out from under AT&T and even put a bit more oomph behind those iPhone users who might choose to jump carriers.

It’s silly, I know, but as Mrs. Cringely always says, “Husbands die every day.”

By Robert X. Cringely|January 4th, 2011|2011|51 Comments

2011 predictions: One word — bufferbloat. Or is that two words?

As promised, here are my technology predictions for 2011. These columns usually begin with a review of my predictions from the previous year because it annoys me that writers make predictions without consequences. If we are going to claim expertise then our feet should be held to the fire. But last January I didn’t write a predictions column, thinking we were past all that (silly me) so there is nothing with which to embarrass myself here. More sobering still, after last year’s holiday firestorm over our naked card Mrs. Cringely won’t let me post this year’s card. We have become so dull.

We also seem to have become verbose, because my first prediction (below) took 1400 words to write. So tell you what: […]

By Robert X. Cringely|January 4th, 2011|2011|73 Comments

And Then Along Comes Larry….

There’s a premise in big business that no single person is essential to the success of an organization. If I die on the job, microscopic cringely.com dies with me, sure, but if Steve Ballmer kicks-off during a sales meeting tirade, Microsoft will move smoothly onward, or so the idea goes — as far as it goes. Because of course it is frequently wrong. There are many instances where a single person can bring about a sea change in a company or an industry. In the 19th century that meant John D. Rockefeller in oil or Andrew Carnegie in steel. In the 21st century it means Steve Jobs at Apple and Pixar, or Larry Ellison at […]

By Robert X. Cringely|December 29th, 2010|2010|83 Comments

You Can’t Go Home Again

I have worked from home since the first time InfoWorld fired me in 1994. When you work at home you live at work, which is precisely why telecommuting has been so embraced by non-smokestack industries that love the low office rents and longer working hours. But the tide may be turning against working at home for some larger companies. Lockheed-Martin, for example, effectively banned the practice recently, sucking nearly all the company’s telecommuters back into the office. IBM, too, is rethinking its work-at-home strategy.

Lockheed earlier this year told its managers they all had to work from plant sites, then followed that by canceling any telecommuting services paid for by the company. In theory workers can […]

By Robert X. Cringely|December 29th, 2010|2010|47 Comments

The Trojan App

It wasn’t so many years ago, remember, when AT&T (the old AT&T, the U. S. national telephone monopoly) owned the phone wire in your walls. You put the wire there, or your builder did, and you certainly paid for it, but once dial tone filled the lines those lines became the physical property of Ma Bell and you couldn’t legally touch them. Everyone longing for the bad old days should remember when you couldn’t touch your own phone lines under penalty of law. Today or tomorrow, we’re told, the FCC will vote under the guise of net neutrality to re-instill some of those old ways of doing business, at least for wireless networks.

Well it won’t work.

The short story of what’s happening at the FCC […]

By Robert X. Cringely|December 21st, 2010|2010|55 Comments

How To Plug a Leak: Don’t

If the United States is so upset with Julian Assange and Wikileaks for continuing to expose its stash of 200,000+ purloined U. S. diplomatic cables, why aren’t they trying to extradite the guy to face trial in the U. S.? I can think of at least four reasons.

First there’s the problem of actually convicting the guy, which is doubtful. While the Department of State might well be able to extradite Assange, either before or after his date-rape trial in Sweden, they are unlikely to gain a conviction in most U. S. courts. What’s the charge? Violating the Espionage Act outside the United States as an Australian citizen who isn’t accused of having stolen anything? That […]

By Robert X. Cringely|December 20th, 2010|2010|61 Comments

It’s All Downhill from Here

Google Labs has this new lexical research tool you may have read about called a Book Ngram Viewer, which allows you to peek inside five million books published between the 15th century and 2008 to see how many discussed antigravity and when: