Data Circle

One of the sites that I read on a regular basis, Business Logs, has just posted a list of predictions for 2006. Here’s my commentary on what I think of the predictions and what I believe will be happening in 2006.

Apple comes out with widescreen & Intel-powered iBooks in Q1, Mac minis and Powerbooks in Q2, and Powermacs (named G5 still) in Q3.

Whilst it’s fairly obvious that Apple is planning on moving its product lines to Intel processors instead of the IBM-supplied Power PC ones, I think Mike’s timescale here is a little optimistic. I don’t think we’ll see any Intel-powered Apple devices until the spring at the earliest, as I don’t think Apple will have got to the stage where the new offerings are ready for general release, although having said that I am wondering if they’ve been working behind the scenes in order to get something ready for Macworld in January. Perhaps we’ll see a new iBook model then, but personally I doubt it will have a widescreen – that feature will be left to the Powerbooks.

Pricing for iTunes Music Store songs will change based on the popularity of the song.

I’m not entirely sure about this one, as the $0.99 model for iTunes seems to have worked very well for Apple so far, and it’s much easier to charge one price for every song than to start varying based on popularity – it makes the payment system that bit more complicated and a lot of iTunes customers will be used to the “one price fits all” model by now. I suspect that if Apple does change its pricing policy, it will probably be more down to pressure from the music industry, who really are pushing for variable pricing, than a independent decision by the iTunes management.

The major purchaser of budding companies will be C|Net, and they will make a purchase of a 1-2 well-known “web 2.0” companies prior to the start of Q3.

I’ve never been quite sure what to make of C|Net over the past few years, as they haven’t really made much of a name for themselves. I think they’ve been largely overshadowed by the likes of Google and Yahoo, but also when I look at their sites with large Flash ads, lots of nested tables interleaved with absolute positioning using CSS and the sheer amount of material on their home page, I feel that they haven’t really kept up with the way things are going on the web. Looking at their past press releases, they don’t seem to be buying everyone in sight like Yahoo has been doing, and they haven’t made any big name acquisitions recently. I can’t see them buying any “web 2.0” (I hate that phrase) sites in the near future, unless they feel compelled to in order to remain competitive with other large portal/search sites.

Digg will be purchased by C|Net for $5-8M.

As I’ve already explained, I don’t expect C|Net to make any major purchases in the next year, and $5-8 million seems a rather large price tag for Digg. On the other hand, if C|Net turns out to be in the acquistion market then I can see Digg being fairly high on its hit list. I’m not quite sure how it would integrate with the rest of C|Net’s news and services though.

Meebo will not be purchased by anyone this year

I think I agree with Mike and Om on this one – I honestly don’t see Meebo being bought out any time soon. For starters, it brings together the services of four of the biggest web companies (Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft/MSN), and none of those are likely to want to buy a site that promotes their competitors as much as it does them. Not only that, but if one of the big four was to purchase Meebo, the others could easily block users from connecting to their services via the site, rendering it useless. Meebo has also received a fair amount of venture capital recently, so it looks like the site owners are looking to develop and expand rather than aim for a quick sell.

37signals will come out with 3-4 new web applications, effectively doubling their current revenues but only expanding their user base by 25% since current 37s customers are more likely to use future 37s products.

I think 37signals will certainly have another killer web application for us in 2006, although I don’t believe they’ll release 3-4 brand new applications. My prediction is that there will be one genuinely new and innovative application, and an abundance of new features for the existing applications, with perhaps a better version of Writeboard that requires a subscription.

A brand-new web publishing application will launch, take on MovableType and Wordpress, and will be successful. Wordpress will continue its rise, and will eventually be used on all major weblogs that used to use MovableType.

Given that the vast majority of blogs run either MT or WP, and there’s already Textpattern creeping up behind both of those, I can’t see another brand-new application arriving and being successful. It would have to offer features that the existing ones don’t, and an easy method of converting all your comments, posts etc. otherwise who is going to switch to using it? With regards to the rise of Wordpress, I think it will continue to do well and take market share from MovableType, especially if version 2 (which I expect to see some time in the new year) lives up to expectations. I don’t think it will necessarily be used on all major weblogs that currently use MT - that might be a little bit too optimistic – but I expect several of the well known ones to convert at some point in 2006.

Skype’s popularity doesn’t grow as sharply as in 2005, the user base graph flattens off. eBay uses Skype to introduce new auction and community-based services to connect buyers to sellers.

Given how the fuss and publicity surrounding Skype has died down over the past couple of months, I suspect that growth in 2006 won’t be quite as rosy as it has been this year. A lot of people who want Skype accounts now have one, and I imagine that this will mean a much slower rate of signups over the next twelve months.

Skype’s continuing growth also depends in part on how well the new Jabber VoIP(Voice over IP) protocol is received. Google Talk already has support for this protocol, and Google has already released some source code to enable third party clients to interact with users of their software. I suspect that this will encourage a lot of developers (hopefully including the people working on Gaim) to add such functionality to their software and, depending on how hard Google pushes this and how fast take up grows at, this could provide a large base of competition to Skype.

A new weblog advertising model and platform is introduced, but not by any of the current players (WIN, FM Pub, Gawker, etc.). It will take on BlogAds and AdBrite and beat both at their own game.

I suspect, but don’t know for sure, that this is perhaps a plan for 9rules in 2006. If so, I expect Mike to talk it up somewhat, as he’s obviously got a vested interest in its success. I don’t know about beating existing competitors, but if 9rules did launch some form of advertising model/platform for blogs then I suspect it would do well, especially as it would probably have a “cool” factor associated with it. Personally I’ve never really gone in for that sort of stuff (I run Adsense on some of my blogs but don’t make much from it) and I’m not really a believer in what’s cool, hip and happening in the “blogosphere” (I hate that phrase as well). I’ll be keeping a close eye on how things develop in that area though, because even if I don’t jump into all the new stuff at the deep end I do like to keep my finger on the pulse.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 26th, 2005 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Apple, Business, Instant Messaging, Internet, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.