2016 was a year of surprises. And there will most certainly be a lot more interesting things to come in 2017. Here are my thoughts on a few developments we’re likely to see in the year ahead.
- We will see major financial problems begin to take shape at hardware companies without a solid cloud strategy.
- Trump’s new offshore tax rules will bring a flood of cash to tech companies – much of this will be shared via dividends and buybacks, but it will also find its way into M&A as well as new product development.
- Smart factories with low-cost energy will make the U.S. a major force in manufacturing. But this prediction will take 10 years to play out, and thanks to IoT and robotics, the factory of tomorrow will need 1/10th the workers of today.
- Chinese cell phone provider Huawei (News - Alert) or Xiaomi will become a serious thorn in the side of Samsung – producing low-cost phones for hundreds less than the Korean maker, and selling them in large numbers outside China. Samsung will lose a lot of U.S. market share as a result.
- Google (News - Alert), buoyed by the success of its Pixel phone, will invest a lot more into hardware. We might not see that until 2018, but we’ll hear the rumors in the summer or fall of 2017.
- Foxconn will become even bigger as companies use it instead of directly moving manufacturing jobs overseas. It will provide a Trump-friendly way of getting around offshoring manufacturing.
- Energy prices in the U.S. will plummet, and green energy will go through a major trough of despair. This will present problems for Tesla.
- Toward the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, the 4K monitor will become a far more common fixture on desks.
- Goodbye net neutrality – we hardly knew you. Instead of forcing carriers to carry outside traffic at high priority for free, a Trump FCC will be more concerned about how many jobs will be created by the carriers that will promise jobs in return for gutting net neutrality.
- The AT&T/Time Warner acquisition will go through as the Trump administration gets Ma Bell to promise to keep jobs in the U.S. and/or add more.
- U.S. tech companies (among others) will be in the crosshairs of countries looking at the tariffs the U.S. imposes on its imports.
- The dollar will continue to strengthen, and interest rates will continue to rise.
- Apple will buy the Ring video doorbell, and my old pal Jamie Siminoff will launch yet another successful startup 12 to 18 months later.
- HD voice interop will get real, finally allowing users to make HD calls from one wireless carrier to just about any other.
- GSMA RCS will finally become a real thing in the U.S., allowing carriers to offer services like Facebook Messenger. But these communications service providers will have a tough time competing with Silicon Valley.
- NFV will become more popular in the U.S. – success stories will spread, and even more carriers will adopt it. Carriers will also realize they are going from hardware lock-in to software lock-in and now pay higher maintenance costs – perhaps as high as 25 percent.
- All carriers will be forced to purchase media companies to compete with AT&T and Verizon.
- Apple will make real progress with new iPads in the hopes of the new devices getting the tablet market to grow again
- Apple’s third-gen smart watch is the one you’ve been waiting for. It will likely become a must-have for serious wearable tech enthusiasts.
- Microsoft (News - Alert) will continue to out-cool Apple with more products like Surface Studio. It will release an amazing Surface Phone, but it will be really tough for Microsoft to gain traction against Android and Apple.
- Someone will acquire Twitter (News - Alert) as it continues to replace the news media, to enable unbiased communications between President Trump and the public.
- Obamacare will be replaced by a unique algorithm matching patients to doctors, just like TripAdvisor matches travelers to hotels.
- Self-driving everything will become a major cause of unemployment.
- The retail sector will spend billions to match Amazon’s worker-free store of the future.
- Jet.com will become a major force competing with Amazon after Walmart makes major investments in the company, which it now owns.
- Someone (Apple, Google or Amazon) will one-up AT&T’s DirectTV Now with a service that includes DVR and works well. And millions will cancel cable as a result.
- Low-cost energy means the pressure on the tech industry to reduce energy consumption will be paused. This will hurt ARM but help Intel (News - Alert).
- Car keys will be replaced by phones with Bluetooth.
- The auto insurance industry will see reduced accidents thanks to self-driving/parking vehicles and will step in to incentivize consumers and businesses to buy vehicles with these features.
- The sharing economy will extend to spouses, allowing you to rent one temporarily and without the hassles of divorce and losing half your assets.
- The smart home will take shape, with new standards allowing cameras to interoperate with security, lighting, motion sensors, entertainment, music, etc.
- Hackers will hack a smart city, scaring the living daylights out of the global media and governments.
- The last remnants of privacy will go up in smoke as virtually all companies and government agencies get hacked.
- The encryption battle between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government will get far worse as more iPhones used by terrorists are deemed unbreakable by law enforcement.
- It will be discovered that some secure messaging apps are actually authored by government spy agencies.
- Italy and/or France will break away from the EU, sealing the fate of this failed union experiment.
- Two to five percent of our population will be lost to VR – like people are lost to drugs or alcohol. This number will grow by a few percent a year and max out when 15 to 20 percent of our population is unable to function outside of their VR cocoons.
Edited by Alicia Young