At the beginning of every year, a bunch of people make a bunch of predictions about what they think is going to happen in the next 12 months.
Quite often the predictions either amount to state-the-obvious shite [ie: people will use the internet so companies will advertise on it] or a more abstract point of view [ie: the Christian Church will buy Walmart so they can count customers as followers] … however what is common is that in most cases, what people say will happen, doesn’t – or at least not in the detail they suggested.
And another thing that drives me nuts is when people claim they had the idea for something, even though when you ask them about it – you realise what they had originally said was so ambiguous [and so long ago] that it was probably the mad ramblings of a 4 year old child.
“I WISH TOMATO KETCHUP WAS GREEN!”
Zoom forward god-knows how long, and some marketing fuckwit at Heinz [or possibly the same person who had the ‘idea’ in the first place] decides to launch this:
Mind you, given sooooooooooooooooo many people regard these pseudo-Nostradamus’ as geniuses, I’d like to go on record and say I foresee a time where transportation is powered by water.
Got it? Cool – that’s my legacy sorted out then.
Look, I have no problem with people making statements about the future – hell, I do it all the time, especially because I can always say “it hasn’t happened yet, come back to me in 10 years and then we can discuss it” if someone disagrees with me – but so many of these self-appointed social commentators express themselves with absolute authority and [stupidly] give specific timeframes to when we’ll see it all happening.
They need to take some lessons from politicians.
Anyway …
The point of this post [and there is one. Somewhere] is that amongst all these folk who profess to know specifically what people are going to think/do/say/believe in the next 12 months, there are some who are genuinely smarty-pants and one of those is an old colleague of mine, Richard Watson.
Apart from being in possession of one of the greatest heads of hair since Brian May, Richard is one of those over-achieving clever buggers as demonstrated by the fact he is a bona-fide consultant, author, speaker, futurist and founder of the brilliant NowAndNext.
Anyway, he’s already smarter, nicer and cleverer than me so I don’t want to be too complimentary to him – however I do want to draw your attention to a chart he’s just created detailing the trends & timelines for new tech in 2010 because it’s bloody interesting and also very cool to look at.
You can DOWNLOAD IT HERE … and if it turns out that only 20% of what Richard say’s is right – you still have 12 months of sounding more interesting and intelligent at dinner parties/pubs/BBQ’s than the loud-mouthed, one-dimensional advertising ‘guru’ who is declaring “2010 is the year Apple will launch another iPod, except they’ll give it a different name so the label and style whores will think it’s a totally-new, must-have product”.
See, win:win … except for me, given I am that loud-mouthed, one-dimensional ad twat.
Bollocks.