Last Year's Predictions

Last night I was wondering what would happen this year in tech and entertainment and I remembered I had written some predictions last year.

How did I do? Not so good. It wasn't quite the exciting year I had imagined. I have a much smaller set of predictions I'll be posting soon.

Retail

• Target and CVS partnership - turns out the pharmacy side actually happened in 2015 (shows how aware I am).  Target taking over the store side hasn't happened.
• Wal*Mart and T-Mobile banking joint venture.  Nope.

Content

• Verizon sells its inboxes to Comcast and other media properties to Meredith, Condé Nast and Discovery - nope
• Disney+ launches at $24.95 (nope) and has technical difficulties at the start - yep
• Apple and Verizon each consider buying Netflix - perhaps
• Netflix acquires a majority of the TV/movie production capacity in Vancouver - nope
• Discovery launches its video-on-demand service and Amazon acquires it. - mostly no. Discovery is taking way too long to launch stuff.
• AT&T / WarnerMedia pass governmental reviews - yep - WarnerMedia has a few bad quarters until AT&T goes hands-off - nope - There is talk of a spin-off - nope.

Marketing

• Google adds an ESP - nope
• Microsoft adds an ESP - nope - also begins to craft its own competitor to Gmail's AMP with Yahoo, Salesforce and Comcast - no, may be collaborating with Google 
• Microsoft,  Salesforce and Oracle are still lacking in a good web analytics/tracking offering for their Marketing Clouds. - YES!
• Adobe rebrands Marketo as Campaign, begins to sunset Neolane - nope.

HR-as-a-Service

• Salesforce makes a large purchase in the HR/payroll space - nope
• And kicks of an HRaaS arms-race - nope

Hardware

• Microsoft buys Roku, integrates it into Xbox. - nope
• Intel and Vodaphone Global Enterprises enter into a joint-venture as a precursor to an eventual merger - nope
• Tesla's next generation of automatic driving software begins to develop a 3D memory of hills, curves, potholes and speed bumps allowing it to optimize acceleration and braking, resulting in a 15% improvement in range without any hardware changes while delivering a smoother ride. - sadly, not so far as I know

Software

• Apple doubles-down on its "context-less instant awareness" efforts with additional imaging and cognitive purchases, struggles without a new category-killer but makes progress on its car, but it's still slow going and rumors persist that they're going to stop work on it.  Services continue to make them heaps of money. - eh
• Microsoft makes great progress on its AI-based ribbon in the office products - sadly, no

Mergers

• Dell EMC outbids IBM for HPE.  Lexmark gets HP(consumer products). - nope
• Steam announces it's open to strategic offers. - nope
• GM attempts a hostile takeover of Tesla. - nope
• Ford becomes majority-owned by Chinese-interests sparking anger, protests and idiots burning their cars. - nope

Other

• Twitter loses money. - too easy
• Snap loses money, enters talks with Twitter, but nothing comes of it. - not so far as I know
• Specs leak for the Samsung Galaxy S11. It has a lot of cameras and Bixby.  - probably