After being left red-faced after the Y2K debacle, few commentators are willing to make bets on what 2001 will hold. After the crystal ball cracks that appeared last year, it's tough to predict the future.
Widespread forecasts of doom -- the lights going out in China and mainframes going bonkers in Silicon Valley -- turned out to be bogus as the world rang in 2000 with only a few hiccups. The Y2K bug will likely go down in history as the worst prognostication fiasco ever for the thousands of analysts, business executives, technologists and media pundits who pretended to be fortune-tellers.
Nervous about going out on a gloom-and-doom limb again, futurists have dramatically scaled back their predictions for 2001.
In fact, few high-profile commentators have made even vaguely definitive predictions for the first official year of the new millennium. Many people claiming to predict events that will happen in 2001 have merely slapped a forward spin on entrenched trends from earlier this year or in the 90s: the growth of trends such as broadband Internet access for the masses, distributed computing, instant messaging, and Internet-enabled appliances and gadgets such as washing machines and alarm clocks.
Nonetheless, some moderately off-the-wall predictions are percolating among futurists, think tanks and journalists. Here are a few, culled from a search of business and technology publications, university archives and the Internet.
