The future: tiny3G, electric cars, your house, and the cloud
blog.dustincurtis.com
blog.dustincurtis.com
3. I'm really hoping that the Palm Pre sells well and becomes an alternative platform to the iPhone. This isn't because I don't like Apple; I just like competition/choice. I think that once Verizon goes to LTE and Apple's exclusivity with AT&T is over, we'll see iPhones available for more networks.
4. I'm not sure voters were more informed. While I'm happy that Obama is president, I'd have to say it was still business as usual. The Obama campaign did an amazing marketing job. Truly gorgeous in every way.
5. OpenID had a flawed premise - that people knew what a URI was and could be re-taught to think of a URI as their ID (rather than a username or email address). It doomed it. I'm hoping that OpenID will reinvent itself using the name@domain.ext pattern. People already know and accept that and you can easily put in a small snippet in the HTML on that page that will deal with getting people to the OpenID server for the domain. Facebook's Connect won't take off as Facebook would like. Facebook is just too proprietary - they don't like competition, they don't want to give you access to their valuable data, and they don't make it a seamless experience.
Cloud stuff will do better as prices come down - and they'll have to. Part of the problem right now is that it's expensive. Take Dropbox. They charge $99/year for 50GB of space. Most people want more than 50GB for all their stuff, so that's only a subset of their stuff. But Dropbox can't give a lot more storage given Amazon S3's cost - 50GB * 15 cents per GB * 12 months = $90. And that doesn't account for things like bandwidth, requests, and app servers - or all those free 2GB accounts. I'm not saying that Dropbox is doomed - far from it. I'm saying that cloud resources will come down in price over the next several years which will make those services much more economical.
The electric car still faces a host of hurdles. First is that battery technology isn't that great. A123 Systems is working on some cool new technology, but I'm taking a wait and see approach. Hydrogen fuel cells are a great way of storing energy, but they aren't exactly green tech - you still have to produce the energy you'll be storing in them, same as a battery. I'm guessing we missed a bit of the window on non-petrol cars for a while with gas now down to $2/gal and stable.
Whether the auto industry recovers is probably going to depend on consumer habits, not technology. Oil is running out, but if it's running out in 10 years or running out in 40 years makes a huge difference to whether technology is going to be the determinant. It's looking more like last year was speculation than an actual indication of constraint. If that's the case, the auto industry needs people to get back to buying new vehicles every 6 years. Right now, people are hunkering down and trying to be frugal and conservative with their resources - a good thing, really. They're making sure they're not wasteful. However, if people start keeping cars for 12 years rather than 6 over the long term, the auto industry just won't recover. There's more competitors than ever (going from American producers, to American and European, to American, European and Japanese to all those plus the Koreans and potentially the Chinese next. If people start demanding fewer vehicles, we're going to have to see contraction in the market - and it's going to be the older companies with the highest costs that go first (not just Detroit, the Japanese manufacturers aren't looking so hot right now either; they just have a much bigger cushion from strong growth over the past decade or so).
I'm guessing that in 5 years, most people will forget the lessons of frugality and things will be back to normal (for better or worse). I guess we'll all see where life takes us!