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© 2006 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
I want a piece of the action. I want the opportunity to make embarrassing predictions, be ridiculed by our peers, and live in shame until next January. Here, therefore, is our annual contribution to the landscape of bold, prophetic statements that will surely come back to haunt us...
The new version of Microsoft Office will not be plagued with bugs or security vulnerabilities. It will install without incident and run with acceptable or better performance on a majority of Windows boxes. The pundits will laud it and we commentators will speak of how the new interface will greatly improve productivity through all of the applications.
But the public will not embrace it. More set in their ways than any other type of PC user, daily users of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have spent the past 48 to 60 months likening these apps to their toasters or microwave ovens: not every task is easy, but the mechanics of using the appliance is a no-brainer. That will not be the case at first with the freshly-designed Office 12, and many will find themselves retreating to Office 03 to get today's project out the door "until I have time to sit and play with it." We all know when that time comes -- December 32.
Consequently, Microsoft will consider a compatibility mode to keep the new Office from becoming shelfware.
The Corel Graphics Suite (aka CorelDraw and PhotoPaint) will play to increasingly narrow niche markets, but Paint Shop Pro will hit its stride. It will become the most prominent alternative to Adobe Photoshop and work its way into more and more bundles with digital camera manufacturers.
PhotoPaint will begin to lose its identity and Corel officials will talk seriously about moving PSP into the CGS bundle.
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The CES show in early January scooped me on this one: cameras with two lenses. Kodak debuted this at CES with a single 5MP sensor being mated to a pair of lenses, one fixed at 23mm and the other a 37-117mm zoom. My prediction was going to be that this would appear in 2006; now we will forecast that it will become commonplace this year.
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iPod devotees already speak of watching movies in their hands, but it is not my contention that you will ever watch feature-length movies on your iPod or mobile phone and actually enjoy it. We're getting closer, though: the digital videos that we create at our PhotosToMemories web site will all play quite well on video-enabled handhelds, only requiring about 30MB apiece.
But that's not the same as watching a two-hour movie on your phone, and we know it. Technology cannot create comfort or compensate for lack of same, but there is no reason why your phone cannot be the movie player. A two-hour movie can be delivered in satisfactory 4:3 resolution in about 2GB and many phones, music players, and Palm devices can routinely accept a file of that size. What we will see in 2006 is the wide-spread support for those devices to connect directly to a television for playback.
Whenever Prediction No. 3 becomes a reality, this one will be about six weeks behind: Batteries for handhelds will need to be about twice as good as they are now. Or the entire industry goes to hell!
Perhaps the most painful prediction in multimedia for 2006 will be our beloved TiVo, which will continue to fight to gain traction...and lose the battle. TiVo will become a technology, not a product, and those of us who bought in back in 2000 will be traumatized. For about a day...read on...
The networks will deliver us from our trauma by offering services whereby you can subscribe to a television show and have it automatically download to your PC, with no restrictions or DRM issues. With relatively simple software, and more notably cooperation from the networks at a level not seen before, entirely new life will be breathed into the Windows Media Edition and to PCs billing themselves as media centers.
Before the year is over, I will walk into a house that I have never been in before, take out my mobile phone and wirelessly play a network broadcast on the television there.
...and train all of its employees so that nobody delivers obnoxious and annoying presentations and commits Death by PowerPoint ever again.
Well, six out of seven won't be too bad...
May 2007: As simple as possible, but not simpler... · April 2007: Killer Keystrokes · March 2007: Resolution Confusion · January 2007: Fearless Forecasts for 2007 · November 2006: Epiphanies at PowerPoint Live 2006 · August 2006: Escaping Death by PowerPoint · July 2006: Notes from the Floor of InfoComm · June 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--Making Movies for Business and Pleasure, Part II · May 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--From Photos to DVDs · April 2006: It’s Your Music!--Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunes · March 2006: CorelDraw X3—A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities, all in all, a credible upgrade · February 2006: Making Windows Inhabitable · January 2006: Fearless Forecasts for 2006 · September 2005: Just What is a Background Anyway? · August 2005: Meet David Dobson, Corel's New CEO · July 2005: Community, Blind Dates. and Albert Einstein: An Interview with the PowerPoint Live Conference Host · June 2005: CorelWorld 2005: Image Editors, Executive Appearances, and Krispy Kremes · May 2005: As Adobe's Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse? · March 2005: Delivering Your Presentation: How Close to the Source Can You Get? · February 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation Part II · January 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation · November 2004: A Killer Deal for Corel Or Another Distraction? · September 2004: The Scourge that is Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger · August 2004: The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience, and Slides · July 2004: A Blast from the Past: How Fast is Fast Enough? · June 2004: Guilty Pleasures · May 2004: A Personal Wish List for PowerPoint 12 · April 2004: Eyedropping: Version 12 makes a good tool even better... · March 2004: Deadly Sins Of Modern PowerPoint Usage · February 2004: Is the even-numbered curse finally over? · January 2004: Another take on Achieving Absence of Ugliness · November 2003: What can we do it again??--Debut of PowerPoint Live Leaves Unquenchable Thirst with the Host · September 2003: Corel Corp. Has a New Custodian · July 2003: Candor and Contrition at CorelWORLD · June 2003: What a Long, Great Trip It’s Been! · May 2003: The Boat that Corel is Missing · April 2003: No Fooling...Is Corel Breaking Up? · March 2003: The Annual Design-a-Brochure Contest · February 2003: Symbolism is Everything · January 2003: Mania, Our Semi-Annual Pilgrimage to Holland · October 2002: On Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Paper Bags · July 2002: CorelDRAW 11: Surprise, Surprise... · May 2002: The Sound of Silence: What does it mean when a company plays its cards so close to its chest? · April 2002: The Art and Science of Presentation Graphics--Creating for the Screen Has its own Challenges · March 2002: CorelDRAW 11: What kind of personality and attitude should a software program have today? · February 2002: Oy, my aching fingers... · December 2001: Digital Photography · November 2001: Can we say goodbye to the Rolls Royce Mentality? · October 2001: An Unforgettable Week: The drama that unfolded around CorelWORLD · August-September 2001: The Art of Paragraphics: New-age ingredients for success with Corel VENTURA · July 2001: Your Very Own Interface: How to make Corel applications read your mind · June 2001: Fighting the Font Wars: How to stay sane with your sans · May 2001--Turning the Key at Nicholas-Applegate · April 2001--A Modest Proposal for Reviving VENTURA Publisher
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