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Hindsight is 20/20. You don't get to reinterpret statements made earlier just because he got the general gist. Like he said, his specificity screwed him (lapto

Hindsight is 20/20. You don't get to reinterpret statements made earlier just because he got the general gist. Like he said, his specificity screwed him (laptops, xml, etc) - He's totally not being too hard on himself. He's being fair and honest in his evaluation. It would be super easy to predict trends if you are nonspecific: I predict new and shiny will win in 10 years. Bleh that's a non-statement.

jandrese 11y ago
> It would be super easy to predict trends if you are nonspecific Otherwise known as the Nostradamus principle.
jack9 11y ago
> You don't get to reinterpret statements made earlier just because he got the general gist. Of course someone can. You can do whatever you want too. Predictions are hard and any correlation in 11 years is impressive, as are these. The question raised is not "is this fair or accurate according to my standards" but moreso, "who cares?"
mgalka 11y ago
Agree. It's an interesting post, and I don't mean any criticism toward him (the thought process was good), but in practice I'm not sure he truly got any of them right. "a new internet community hangout will appear" is not really a prediction. People have been "hanging out" online since BBS's and AOL. Would anyone bet against the same prediction looking from today forward? The only other one where he gave himself full marks is "someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications." It's true of course, but PaaS is not specific to open source applications. If you take away the open source part, what he got right was that someone would make money by hosting webapps. And that's been happening in some form since at least the early 2000's when AWS launched. That probably sounds more critical than I meant it. My hats off to him hitting a lot of them pretty well. But I wouldn't say he is going easy on himself with the scoring.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  AWS didn't come out until 2006, and it was considered pretty revolutionary at the time. The way you hosted a website in 2004 was that you signed up with a web hosting provider and either rented a shared webhost for $10/month or paid for a dedicated server for about $60/month. There were little or no provisions for being able to grow your hosting needs at the click of a button. When you read stories of how eg. HotOrNot scaled, it involved a lot of panicked calls to investors, and on-the-phone negotiations with hosting providers where they were like "We need more servers now, we'll make sure we can get you the money within 30 days", often followed by a tech going down to the datacenter and physically installing a new server in the colo cage. The other revolutionary part of his prediction is "Someone will make a lot of money". ISPs & hosting in 2004 were a very competitive commodity business, filled with overcapacity from the dot-com boom.
  - curun1r 11y ago
    > AWS didn't come out until 2006, and it was considered pretty revolutionary at the time. He did work at Amazon until 2005, so he likely saw the internal development that resulted in what would become the publicly-available AWS. And some of his other predictions strike me as being heavily influenced by what he saw working at Amazon. Companies like Amazon and Google tend to encounter problems a few years before the rest of the world realizes that those are even concerns. So making predictions about the industry at large based on the cutting edge technologies used inside those companies is actually a pretty reasonable assumption. For example, according to Wikipedia, Dynamo and BigTable were developed in 2004. So while NoSQL would have seemed revolutionary to almost everyone outside of Amazon and Google in 2004, to people working inside those companies, that prediction was basically predicting that their ideas would work and become very successful. I'd also bet there were a ton of Google engineers that saw Map Reduce before it was made public that could have predicted in 2003 that computationally-heavy tasks would be primarily distributed in a few years. And there's probably a bunch of Intel employees who could have predicted in 2004 that the chips Intel would be selling a decade later would run at the same GHz as their current offering since 2005 was about the time that they switched to adding more cores. When you're ahead of the curve, you can see what's coming around the corner before the rest of us.
jsmeaton 11y ago
How specific do you need to be? Do you need to provide implementation details? I give full marks for the XML Database prediction because he began with this statement: "Nobody likes to do O/R mapping; everyone just wants a solution." And then: "XML is the most popular vehicle for representing loosely-structured, heirarchical data." I could quite happily interpret that as "schemaless databases (using the most popular vehicle for representing loosely-structured data) will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011". I'll take marks off for 2011 being too early, but not for the datatype choice. It's unfortunate that he went into more detail by describing XPath and current support for XML operations, but I feel that's just justification for the specificity of the datatype choice in the title. I totally agree with you regarding laptops and apple though. "New and shiny" is hardly a prediction, and the specificity is relevant to the prediction.
- Goladus 11y ago
  > I'll take marks off for 2011 being too early, but not for the datatype choice. I would. If he had said something like "XML is most popular... but really meant for documents not data, so something similar will probably replace XML" then I would have given full marks, even if he didn't specify JSON or BSON explicitly. (I would give ~50% though, not 20%)

jandrese 11y ago

> It would be super easy to predict trends if you are nonspecific Otherwise known as the Nostradamus principle.

jack9 11y ago

> You don't get to reinterpret statements made earlier just because he got the general gist. Of course someone can. You can do whatever you want too. Predictions are hard and any correlation in 11 years is impressive, as are these. The question raised is not "is this fair or accurate according to my standards" but moreso, "who cares?"

mgalka 11y ago

Agree. It's an interesting post, and I don't mean any criticism toward him (the thought process was good), but in practice I'm not sure he truly got any of them right. "a new internet community hangout will appear" is not really a prediction. People have been "hanging out" online since BBS's and AOL. Would anyone bet against the same prediction looking from today forward? The only other one where he gave himself full marks is "someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications." It's true of course, but PaaS is not specific to open source applications. If you take away the open source part, what he got right was that someone would make money by hosting webapps. And that's been happening in some form since at least the early 2000's when AWS launched. That probably sounds more critical than I meant it. My hats off to him hitting a lot of them pretty well. But I wouldn't say he is going easy on himself with the scoring.

nostrademons 11y ago
AWS didn't come out until 2006, and it was considered pretty revolutionary at the time. The way you hosted a website in 2004 was that you signed up with a web hosting provider and either rented a shared webhost for $10/month or paid for a dedicated server for about $60/month. There were little or no provisions for being able to grow your hosting needs at the click of a button. When you read stories of how eg. HotOrNot scaled, it involved a lot of panicked calls to investors, and on-the-phone negotiations with hosting providers where they were like "We need more servers now, we'll make sure we can get you the money within 30 days", often followed by a tech going down to the datacenter and physically installing a new server in the colo cage. The other revolutionary part of his prediction is "Someone will make a lot of money". ISPs & hosting in 2004 were a very competitive commodity business, filled with overcapacity from the dot-com boom.
- curun1r 11y ago
  > AWS didn't come out until 2006, and it was considered pretty revolutionary at the time. He did work at Amazon until 2005, so he likely saw the internal development that resulted in what would become the publicly-available AWS. And some of his other predictions strike me as being heavily influenced by what he saw working at Amazon. Companies like Amazon and Google tend to encounter problems a few years before the rest of the world realizes that those are even concerns. So making predictions about the industry at large based on the cutting edge technologies used inside those companies is actually a pretty reasonable assumption. For example, according to Wikipedia, Dynamo and BigTable were developed in 2004. So while NoSQL would have seemed revolutionary to almost everyone outside of Amazon and Google in 2004, to people working inside those companies, that prediction was basically predicting that their ideas would work and become very successful. I'd also bet there were a ton of Google engineers that saw Map Reduce before it was made public that could have predicted in 2003 that computationally-heavy tasks would be primarily distributed in a few years. And there's probably a bunch of Intel employees who could have predicted in 2004 that the chips Intel would be selling a decade later would run at the same GHz as their current offering since 2005 was about the time that they switched to adding more cores. When you're ahead of the curve, you can see what's coming around the corner before the rest of us.

jsmeaton 11y ago

How specific do you need to be? Do you need to provide implementation details? I give full marks for the XML Database prediction because he began with this statement: "Nobody likes to do O/R mapping; everyone just wants a solution." And then: "XML is the most popular vehicle for representing loosely-structured, heirarchical data." I could quite happily interpret that as "schemaless databases (using the most popular vehicle for representing loosely-structured data) will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011". I'll take marks off for 2011 being too early, but not for the datatype choice. It's unfortunate that he went into more detail by describing XPath and current support for XML operations, but I feel that's just justification for the specificity of the datatype choice in the title. I totally agree with you regarding laptops and apple though. "New and shiny" is hardly a prediction, and the specificity is relevant to the prediction.

Goladus 11y ago
> I'll take marks off for 2011 being too early, but not for the datatype choice. I would. If he had said something like "XML is most popular... but really meant for documents not data, so something similar will probably replace XML" then I would have given full marks, even if he didn't specify JSON or BSON explicitly. (I would give ~50% though, not 20%)