Good Year: Google
Not the hardest of predictions, but we've had six months of Google backlash and the boys from the 'Plex are still looking good. What remains most exciting is that for all we've been wowed by the technology, Google remains a media company. Its money is coming from the deflating corpses of old media -- newspapers, radio stations, TV companies -- as the online advertising beast gets fed.
Because Google thrives on data, not selling technology, it can give technology away as much as it likes providing only it gets more data in return. If it decides to create a free online Web service-based office suite, it will only help its cause. Were Microsoft to try and do that, it would attack its own revenue stream at its most vulnerable point. Will that happen? At some point, it must.
Or Google could use its immense and ever-growing server infrastructure and interests in communication and wireless to move into media distribution, online gaming, TV, corporate data management -- its limiting factors are its ability to manage its growth and ambition without breaking the 'don't be evil' brand value it's produced. That's a better class of problem.
Bad Year: Apple
The iPod is at the top of its game now: it cannot get better. It cannot get smaller, more colourful, or sound nicer. The Queen and George W. Bush have one, yet it's still seen as an icon of the counter-culture: there is literally nowhere for it to go. Except as part of Apple's integrated media strategy -- which is, alas, missing. Together with Apple's mobile phone strategy and enterprise strategy.
There's the move to Intel chips, which in the currently fashionable phraseology involves transplanting an entire developmental ecosystem to a new planet. One, moreover, already populated with a huge number of very hungry Intel-based monsters capable of destroying margins in a microsecond.
For all it has created a grossly expanded niche, Apple remains a vertical market company in the guise of a horizontal. It needs more pillars if the roof isn't going to fall in.
Good Year: Mobile Broadband
Forget the arguments about WiMax versus Wi-Fi versus 3G versus HSDPA versus a thousand other acronyms describing stuff that even its inventors aren't sure actually exists. What people want is broadband on the move -- and that's broadband like they get at home, affordable, connected to the Internet and with no messing about.
This year, that's what we'll get. Mobile operators are making money with uncapped, fixed price services in Scandinavia, and that's with ordinary 3G. They'll make more money with HSDPA, and that's being rolled out overseas -- and trialled in Australia -- as you read this.
Things will really get going once mobile broadband becomes cheap and efficient enough to threaten the fixed-line market. Not this year, but maybe next.
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