The yearly technology forecasting game tends to be too earnest and too obvious. In part, that is because when the big research houses, like IDC and Gartner, prepare their lists, it is a consensus of their analysts. And why not? The strength of the large research firms is their deep benches — the breadth and depth of their industry smarts. The results, though, are works of what today is called collective intelligence and what used to be called a committee.
A bracing contrast comes from Mark R. Anderson, chief executive of the Strategic News Service, a predictive technology newsletter. His list is decidedly the idiosyncratic work of one man. If distance lends perspective, he has it; Mr. Anderson resides in Friday Harbor, Wash., a town on San Juan Island, about halfway between Seattle and Vancouver.
Fearlessly opinionated and unfettered by statistical analysis, Mr. Anderson delivered his technology predictions for this year at a dinner in New York Monday night, hosted by Genesys Partners, a venture capital firm. The attendees included the organizers and speakers at the two-day Information Industry Summit, sponsored by the Software and Information Industry Association, which began on Tuesday.
Here are a few of Mr. Anderson’s prognostications I found provocative or intriguing.
— “TV becomes the new center of gravity in the tech universe, as all other devices find their niches in the TV galaxy.” Signs of progress, he said, will include Microsoft’s deeper integration of Kinect, its voice- and gesture-controlled add-on to the Xbox, to television sets. And “smartphone TV integration software becomes a new category,” he said.
Apple, he said, will hustle to get a new, souped-up version of its lackluster Apple TV out this year. Mr. Anderson does not firmly predict that Apple will have the product ready in time for the 2012 holiday season. But if it does, Mr. Anderson said Apple TV will be a “roaring success, shipped quickly to be taken as Tim Cook’s first great product success, instead of what it really is: Steve Jobs’s last.”
— “Google loses technology control of Android,” Mr. Anderson said, as Asian manufacturers increasingly develop unlicensed versions of Google’s open-source operating system for smartphones and tablets.
— “Siri stuns the world,” he said. The door will open to more Siri-style digital personal assistants. “It’s not unlikely that we’ll see duels between assistants, a la ‘Jeopardy’ for handhelds, as the media gets the idea,” he said.
“We enter the amazing world of Dave and HAL, as voice recognition comes of age,” Mr. Anderson said, referring to the dialogue between man and machine in the 1968 sci-fi classic, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
The mainstream march of voice recognition, he said, will bring “lots of funny stories, big bloopers and amazing breakthroughs.”
“By the end of the year,” he said, “talking to machines in a normal voice will not seem unusual, nor the cause of unending frustration.”
Here is a link to Mr. Anderson’s full plate of predictions, which was published to his newsletter subscribers last month. (I confess, I missed it then, when I was traveling through Silicon Valley on assignment for The Times’s Science section — and negligent of my Bits duties.)