In his prediction post for 2007, Two thousand and heaven, Martin Geddes made some of the points that hit closest to home, and closest to reality. As Martin points out at the very end of his post, "Disclaimer: I’m an analyst, not a futurist. Caveat lector." That fact that he is an analyst, and one who really and truly understands the industry, is evident in his forecast.

I'm not replicating all his points here. Go read his post for that, and leave him comments if you agree or disagree. But these are ones I really wanted to touch on in just a tad more depth. Martin's statements are in bold italics. My comments follow.

The only thing of interest to happen in the US market will be Sprint and Clearwire launching new wireless broadband networks. Otherwise, regulatory capture continues as usual.

I think Muni WiFi will be more interesting, but slow to prevail in the US. And I expect the telcos will drag Muni WiFi efforts into court at every turn to slow down its potential erosion of their wireline customer base. Meanwhile, that wireline base will leave in ever increasing numbers.

Private equity and vulture capital will start to circle telcos, looking to break them up and sweat the assets harder off a lower cost base. Several corporate jets will remain permanently in the hanger.

I'm honestly not sure how fully I agree with this one for the US. There's only one telco, again...AT&T. The powers that be have continued the trend at reassembled the horrendous Bell System in some small way. Oh sure, there's Verizon, spun out of GTE and a small handful of Bell companies. There's Qwest, forever imprinted with the imprint Jumpin' Joe Naccio brought from AT&T. There are wireless carriers that arguably hold some independence. There's a third entity at play in the US besides private equity and venture/vulture capital. There's the FCC, the silent arm of the US telecommuncations industry. Until the next adminstration steps in, and then assuming there's some drastic reshaping of the FCC (which I view as unlikely), I expect to see more of what we've seen for the last good many years - federal support, via money to legislators and the FCC, for whatever the legacy telcos decide is a good idea. I'm not optimistic.

Companies adding real-time communications to the Web (presence, chat, voice, etc.) will keep Om’s newsfeed busy.

I agree they'll keep Om's newsfeed busy. I don't think they'llenjoy whopping success. There's still the issue of how presence and identity come together. And there's still no interest in the enterprise space. It will stay a consumer niche through 2007 I think. with limited consumer interest because of the next entry from Martin.

Mobile IM will launch all over the place, but the users will generally be too busy texting each other to care until a richer presence model (“travelling”, “roaming”, “in a call”) adds some real value (which won’t happen widely until 2008/9).

I probably agree to excess. Mobile IM is, in my view, already a quickly dying market. It's irrelevant and useless as SMS/text messaging already delivers everything users want. We're at least two years from seeing anything useful in the IM space.

Side note: If you think I'm overstating the penetration of SMS messaging, go take a look and Twitter and the like. You'll find the services overrun not just with GenX, but heavily used by "old people" like me. IM has become irrelevant as text messaging overran it. I rarely use an IM client these days. They've been replaced by something more useful and productive.

The “hit” services will continue to be cross-media, just as with voting (TV+SMS), ads (billboards/magazines+SMS), photos (PC+camphone). “Mobile rules” will start to look anachronistic, but “mobile mandatory” will be a truism.

Mobile mandatory is the key phrase. The death of the PC is in sight. Smartphones become mobile workstations. The PC as a tool is less useful each day. Mobility is the secret treasure where the real money will be derived down the road. Mobility and ubiquitous service coverage.


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