UPDATE: Inquiries about the iPad: This forecast is unchanged. I already use the Nexus (modified to run multi-touch) with Google Voice and do not have a 2 year contract. I already run Chrome OS on a Mini 10v and it's super fast, virus free, very focused and I get a lot of work done on it, and curiously enough I was also able to install OSX on it, and it performs better than my Generation 1 MacBook Air. It cost me a whopping $275. Straight from Dell. There's no way in hell you'll find me or anyone with half a brain walking into a two year contract on a device with no camera, no gps, a monthly payment to AT&T and no discount if you use an iPhone and an iPad. The platform isn't even accessible to developers. You must be approved by the app store. i.e. you can't write an app and sell it to friends. Apple's greatest threat right now is not Google. It's their own damn greed. Jeff Bezos moved MOUNTAINS to get the Sprint deal done on the Kindle setting the standard in the marketplace that the book seller will make money off the books and we get the bandwidth for free. Apple is now working to undo that. To make sure we get charged at every turn. The bandwidth for the downloaded book or movie, the cost of the download its self, PLUS THE COST OF THE BANDWIDTH USED TO SHOP THEIR STORE. Someone there has got to be kidding. Because they apparently just tried to sell us a Big iPhone, that's arguably a hundred times more expensive than the kindle. So to answer everyone's inquiry at once: No, the iPad does not change the forecast below. The $800 bucks I spent on my Nexus and Chrome OS Mini yielded an order of magnitude more speed, features and accessibility than the 899 you'd pay for an iPad. You'd have to be a zealous cultist to run out and buy a portable web browser without any signifigant differentiating feature other than the app store they yoke you with.

I should stop a moment thought to mention that I have great respect for Steve Jobs. He is one of my role models and as a man who never went to college, has made his way on his own mix of street smarts, vision, mettle and dumb luck: I like to feel we have some things in common. It's my hope that Steve Jobs is not stressed out by the reaction to the iPad. We all know he would like to bow out with a bang. In my eyes we have been so lucky, to have a man come and pave the way for the personal computer revolution. To take a personal interest in his work at the level that most men reserve only for god. We were lucky to have that same man push to make sure average people could make apps. Not just career developers. His "Interface Builder" on the NEXT computer did just that for a man named Sir Tim Berners-Lee who, while working on a NEXT Cube wrote a little program in interface builder called World Wide Web 1.0 which united every computer on the planet. Yes we're lucky to have had the same man come back to Apple and bring about a renaissance where the music industry relented to his will and agreed to sell us 1 song off an album if it's the only one we like. Then he turned to the carriers who would routinely cripple phones so that their users wouldn't have the ability to color outside the contract lines. Verizon routinely crippled motorola's phones before releasing them, giving Motorolla a bad name. It's because of the iPhone's success that Verizon was happy to let Motorola do anything it wanted with the Droid. We all should look at Steve Jobs and see the benefit to the planet when we stand up for what we believe in and are relentless and unmoved by whatever tries to shake us. So I hope the man at the top is not taking this iPad stuff too seriously. It was hard to watch him sit so quietly, presenting the iPad in a subdued tone of voice. I have profound respect for Steve Jobs, and much of my voice I studied from his. It's not a voice that just stays quiet when someone is totally out of line, so I have to call it like I see it. Because I wouldn't say it if I didn't know I was right: "Don't be Evil" is not "BullS#it" as Steve called it the other night. Most people do not recognize that Google is the single most unifying thing ever to happen to human kind. Uniting all of our cultures and all of our languages in the simple practice of asking about what we are curious of and expecting to be able to find something out. This is the awakening of human kind. I've met more people in more countries over the last 6 months than in all the time before in my entire life and it is all thanks to Twitter and Google.

Apple wouldn't be having the trouble it is if it would have opened the platform and just made a "use at your own risk" "b-side" app store. Instead of driving good developers away for bad aps. My friends and I know what it's like to have a Halloween themed app not approved until November. You don't end up feeling seen.


In the next three years we're going to have to learn to control the climate of the planet, we're going to have to catalog all the species and model the relationships of each living thing on the planet with all of the other living things. We have to learn to stabilize our ecosystem and steer the planet. We're going to do that all a hell of a lot faster if our devices are as powerful as they can be, as accessible as they can be and as capable as we can make them. Below is my forecast for 2010 which, even after the iPad, is sound. It's some of the best research I've produced. I hope you all enjoy it.

Sid

Google is big, bigger than anyone thought possible. Once we think it's as big as it could possibly get, it pulls something, and gets bigger. This makes projecting the number of Android and ChromeOS devices we will see next year a tricky task. Try and you run into a few key data points have me preparing for a flood of Google powered hardware.