Two Years From Now

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April 15, 2004

Worthington Distribution

Worthington Distribution - Anyone Can Offer Parts, We Offer Solutions. Apparently these are the guys to go to for all home automation stuff. Bad site, great company I hear!

Posted by Martin at 03:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 07, 2004

Mark Anderson's 10 predictions for 2004

Mark Anderson, published these predictions in a recent newsletter...

He has been right many times. Very high level predicitons, but macro ideas everyone should track.

m

TEN PREDICTIONS FOR 2004

Yes, it's that time again. Now that you've read several dozens of such lists, I hope that you'll find this list pragmatic, useful, and perhaps occasionally surprising.

Here, then, are my thoughts on the most important trends in our world for the coming year.

1. We are re-balancing productivity across the globe; 2004 is the year in which this process turns from local political annoyances to an obvious global truth. While the developed world is quite rightly proud of recent productivity increases per quarter in the 2-4% range, there is no comparison with the increases in productivity of workers moving from hand-tool agrarian lifestyles to computer programming or heavy manufacturing.

Those observers who think that China's domination of the global economy is still some comfortable decade or two away are in for a rough surprise. As China moves toward manufacturing the most advanced chips, leading the world in stem cell research, and exporting top-line value-added goods, that hoped-for buffer will turn into years or months. It may be that absolute domination is still 5-10 years away (rather than 15), but at home others will feel it much sooner.

A corollary of this call: Asia "wins" both in technology market growth and as a net exporter of technology goods. South Korea and India will make huge inroads in global markets this year, and, with Japan's money and production knowledge, the region's output will explode.

And the splitting of Europe NW/SE, driven partly by productivity issues, will continue a long-term SNS trend.

2. Corporations trump nations - even in war. While we are all used to thinking just the opposite, given the Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz Pax Americana, the former is true - and those who saw Paul O'Neill's 60 Minutes interview, with the map of an Iraq divided between oil companies, taken from Bush's first week in office, will agree. The just-discovered list of corporations and nations Hussein was paying off in oil contracts to oppose the U.S. invasion further proves the point.

It is fair to say that at the same time nations show their power, they show their weakness.

In other words, the Pax Americana stays in place, and corporations become the defining power structures which play upon that landscape. Corporations already dominate the American electoral and legislative process, and this discussion - so heatedly debated by anti-globalization demonstrators - will seem a thing of the past by year end.

3. The online world becomes real. As suggested, online retail sales in Q4 of '03 just about doubled. In Q4 of this year I suspect there will be an even higher growth rate, perhaps 3-4x. We have just moved from a time in which online sales were experimental and risky, to a time when everyone turns to the Net for purchases.

As the idea of platforms moves from hardware boxes to online sites, the growth in online offerings with sophisticated, safe and helpful customer offerings will see terrific growth. And as these sites continue to open their technology and customer bases to other businesses a la eBay and Amazon and Expedia and Autobytel.com, we'll see an acceleration in transactions at all price ranges - with high-ticket items purchased becoming more commonplace.

Last year will become the last in which online transactions were considered unusual; this year the online world becomes the real world.

4. 2004: The Year of Broadband. Although U.S. citizens may wonder about this, the time is now: whole nations are already there, and many more are moving as quickly as they can. Countries that understand the power of public/private partnership in accelerating the deployment of broadband as an economic stimulus will become the economic leaders of the next decade. That puts places like Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Canada, Taiwan, Iceland, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Netherlands, and Japan, in the vanguard - and ahead of the U.S. If your country's leaders haven't figured this out yet, find new ones.

As broadband penetration increases, look for advertising-based business models to return, further feeding megamedia bottom lines and the ranks of startups.

5. The dollar has bottomed, but there will be no immediate strong return. As with jobs, I think a large number of investors somehow think that the dollar will come rushing back to prior strengths as soon as the Fed begins ratcheting things up - which they are certain to do this year - at least immediately after the November election. (Yes, I think "Fireman" Greenspan is just vain enough to hold off till then in return for another already-promised term.)

Raising rates will certainly strengthen the dollar, but I don't expect the Japanese to stop being interventionists, nor do I expect those 3MM lost jobs to reappear, while I do expect Bush to continue running up the deficit. The result: a mild renewal of interest in the dollar, but not enough to create major movements.

More interesting on the currency front: how do the Europeans battle Asia in the currency wars, perhaps using the dollar as a tool? They could sell Yen and buy dollars, in order to drive the Renminbi up and increase leverage in the U.S. market. With the Japanese doing the same thing, we may see an intervention-based dollar strengthening, but it won't be sustainable.

6. Biotech finally fulfills its promise. Even today, this sounds like a dream that may never be achieved, but by the end of the year we will become used to the idea that the long-held dreams of designer drugs and genetic treatments are real.

Although this will just be the tip of the iceberg, the use of genomic data in cures will provide the first indication that all of those hopes were well-founded, once we had the right basic model.

SNSers know that the real model of genetic control has yet to be described; we'll save that for another year.

7. The first "magic materials" are made in commercial quantities. SNSers know that scientists have made amazing progress in designer materials, from learning how to assemble Buckyballs (buckminsterfullerenes) and carbon nanotubes to fine-tuning crystals for their electro-optic properties.

While many people are very excited about everything nano, it is less clear to some that one of the great revolutions of this century will be in what we used to call materials science, as we learn to first invent and then produce materials with properties literally perfect for each use.

I expect we'll see extremely strong production-quantity nanotube materials this year, and some wonderful surprises in opto-electronic materials as well.

8. We no longer live in a Microsoft World. This is probably hard for non-industry types to believe, insofar as they are experiencing ever more contact with the Redmond colossus, but for those inside the industry this is becoming obvious.

Two years ago, it seemed as though MS were an inevitable juggernaut that would consume every technology market on the planet. Today, as a litany of successful new platforms arise - and as the definition of platforms changes - this seems much less a threat.

If the MS folks are smart, they will use this change, judo fashion, to rid themselves of the monkey they've been carrying on their back for a decade. In a perverse way, being just another big kid on the playground is the next best way for them to expand the empire. Which leads to ---

9. The hub relinquishes control, as intelligence and connections flow to the edge. In "the olden days," as my son would say, intelligence and connectivity were scarce and expensive, so they were put at the hub of all IT org charts, with dumb, non-connected devices hung off them. (And yes, a number of vendors mistakenly see this as the map for invading the den and living room today.)

Now that intelligence is cheap and connectivity (via WiFi, powerlines and even Cat-5 interior cabling) is ubiquitous, the rules have changed. Not only is everything smart, but it is increasingly common to find devices going straight to the Net, without the permission and gatekeeping functions of a central PC.

That's a switch.

10. Worm attacks and worm-driven spam gets worse, and anti-virus software becomes mandatory. Both Billg and I have suggested that, now that we're getting legislatively and technically serious about penalizing spammers and stopping spam, we will have this problem under control in a couple of years. (And yes, Billg is an SNS member, and no, I don't know if he just made that call in Davos because he read it here recently.)

But, having just been through a particularly disturbing week of worm-generated wasted time, I have a brand new suggestion, which I think you'll really like.

Under this new "Kill Spam" regime, I am going to suggest that no computers be allowed to connect to the Net without up to date anti-virus software. If you connect and your software is nonexistent or out of date, your ISP (whose system will do an auto-detect on this) will offer to sell you whatever you need, perhaps even give you a week-freebie update for a couple of times, or to send you where you can get it from someone else. In either case, ISPs will not be allowed to allow you onto the Net until you are protected.

The legal point is this: like driving without insurance, or driving drunk, it is irresponsible (and very dangerous to others) to go without updated protection.

This would not stop all spam (we still need penalties and tools for that), but it would eliminate or defuse worms, worm-driven spam, and the much more serious danger that they pose to the Net.

Just a thought, but it should work fine. This last is more a proposal than a prediction, but I have no doubt that serious, radical steps will need to be taken, and taken soon, to preserve the operational integrity of email and the Net. That we'll be driven to that state of affairs is an easy prediction to make.

Your comments are always welcome.

Sincerely,

Mark R. Anderson

President
Strategic News Service LLC Tel. 360-378-3431
P.O. Box 1969 Fax. 360-378-7041
Friday Harbor, WA 98250 USA Email: sns@tapsns.com

Posted by Martin at 03:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack