Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

The problem with predictions is, they can only be evaluated after the fact. And then it’s easy… But let’s see what I thought would happen in 2010 and if it did…

The first thing I talked about in my predictions post was HTML5. I wasn’t so sure it would find broad adoption. I think I was both wrong and right. It certainly found adoption but it also found the age old struggle of conflicting standard implementations. This holds HTML5 back a bit. Apple helped by not supporting flash on their mobile platforms. I certainly didn’t see that coming. They did give people a strong incentive to jailbreak their device though… Youtube supporting HTML5 video certainly helped, too. Still there’s much to gain. I wonder if it will happen this year, but I think it will be a slow process…

The next one was spot on, but it was an easy prediction anyway. Mobile is the big thing in 2010. I even wrote an article about it in a magazine in the Netherlands (Dutch). One thing I didn’t predict was the immense popularity of tablet computers. That one took me by surprise. I don’t quite see the advantage of making something portable bigger. I wonder how much of the success happened because of hype rather than because of real usefulness. As you can tell, I’m not a tablet owner… Ah, and the Nexus died and so did the Microsoft phones.

The opening up of platforms is an ambiguous one. I strongly hope that it will happen but it doesn’t really follow through. You can now export your Facebook stuff but to call that dataportability really takes it too far. It’s a start nonetheless. We need much more though

The teaming up against Google didn’t happen. Google fights with plenty of competitors but doesn’t seems to be phased by them. Hey, and public pressure made wave stick around (but for how long).

The privacy thing. Well… This is an issue. Privacy is still very much in decline. And strangely Wikileaks (which I didn’t expect to be so big) didn’t help either. Because some narrow-minded people in power feel their private parts being stepped on by forced transparency, the call for even tighter security measures (that don’t actually bring any security to you!) has risen and strangely enough, a government that promised openness and transparency now seems to be in favour of measures that would more likely be expected in China, North Korea and Iran. And it’s not just the USA that’s heading the wrong way. This is really very worrying. We won’t see the last of it this year and it won’t change any time soon…

DRM is still here… sigh

but IPv6 has arrived. Not big yet, but the start has been made. In some countries there will be many people this year that won’t have IPv4 connectivity. This means that these people can’t visit your site and buy your products if you don’t support IPv6. I think that some people are slowly realizing that this is happening. Why don’t you become a IPv6 guru like me on ipv6.he.net.

I wasn’t sure if anything spectacular would happen in the Social Media world and I was right. It didn’t. There are slight shifts in popularity between platforms, but nothing spectacularly new happened.

Then about security. I expected to see big things happening in the Mobile world. And some things did, but not to the extend I expected. Are we just lucky?. In the security world there was one thing though that I didn’t expect and that happened: Stuxnet. This is actually really frightening. A very targeted well working hard to combat worm. There’s lots to read about this elsewhere. I suspect that this is the Security Winner of 2010.

Chrome OS takes a bit longer to arrive. I have begun to doubt if it will be successful after all. The reason is the coming of tablet PCs. They’ve taken the Niche that ChromeOS needs. Even though Google is calling this one of the top 3 projects the company is working on (and hiring people for), I am cautious in predicting much success. If people can have Android, why would they need Chrome?

Finally the Cloud and Saas computing. These indeed have become mainstream. Luckily people begin to see some of the drawbacks so we can now discuss the security issues without being silenced by noisy hype-sounds. I might well write a post about this one day…

So I didn’t do too bad, but I didn’t win all either. What do you think about my predictions of last year? And what happened to your predictions? Stay tuned for my Predictions 2011 post that will be following shortly (if time is available…)