Predictions For 2009

OK, I realize it's a little late to be tossing out my predictions for the next year, but I don't think my 15-day peeking period is really going to give me any huge insights to what will happen during the next 350.  So, here are my predictions for 2009:

• Power.com will get sued into bankruptcy.  I admit it, my main interest in this company is the fact that my father-in-law, Leigh Power, registered the domain power.com back in 1992.  Back then the World Wide Web was neither world-wide nor much of a web.  Desite the unbelievable geek appeal of having the email address of leigh@power.com, he sold it to a Brazilian start up which has built a social network aggregation site.  Keeping in mind that most social networks make their money off of advertisements, I don't believe they'll take kindly some upstart scrapping information off their pages and re-posting it elsewhere.
• Some cell phone carrier will offer $1/month unlimited text messaging.  OMG!  Text messaging is the goose that lays the cell phone carrier's golden egg.  Despite the fact that text messages take a fraction of the cellular bandwidth of regular phone call, carriers still charge you $.20 a message.  Drop another $5 a month to get 400 - 500 messages or, if you have a teenager on your plan, $20 for unlimited messages.  I predict one carrier is going to get so desperate for customers that they will kill the goose and eventually the rest will have to follow.  To be honest, the real prediction would be to guess what the carriers will charge us for next.
• Legal issues in the cloud.  With the growing popularity of cloud computing, the inevitable legal or privacy wrangling will soon follow.  Back in the data center days of 2008, a company knew the legal jurisdiction that its data resided in.  A U.S.-based company, for example, knew that the government couldn't break down the door and help themselves to whatever information they wanted.  (Or, at least, they won't after next week...)  But if your data is in the cloud, how do you know that it's not sitting on a server in China?
• Finally, a virus for the Mac!  Yes, I know there have been Mac security issues before.  But with the Mac OS increasing it's market share to nearly 10%, it is going to become a more tempting target for hackers.  Apple hasn't had it come to Jesus moment yet and tends to be secretive about security flaws and slow to patch them.  All of these make the Mac a more tempting target and I predict that some hacker is going to hit the bullseye in 2009.

 There you have it.  I'll check back in 350 days to see how I did.