Technology news can both surprise and dumbfound. Take the announcement that a researcher found a way to fight cancer with carbon nanotubes. Or the still head-scratching news that auction giant eBay paid up to $4.1 billion to acquire Skype, the mostly free internet phone service.
But just as often, hindsight counsels that a story was so obviously bound to happen that reporters should have filed their copy months before the event actually occurred, just as obituary writers do for aging celebrities.
Here's a collection of 2005 tech stories that, in retrospect, were thoroughly predictable.
The video iPod: Of course Apple would unveil a portable video player. All the signs were present. As with the music-only iPod, other companies had long been selling similar wares. In fact, Archos introduced a mobile video TV recorder 18 months ago.
Apple garnered mammoth media attention in October when Steve Jobs unveiled the company's gorgeous device, which can't record but will happily play back episodes of The Tonight Show that users buy through iTunes for $2 a pop.
Google Maps: In retrospect, how did anyone bear using MapQuest's clunky interface, and why didn't we all realize that dragging a map would feel so good?
Of course, the geniuses at Google recognized that every American's birthright includes not only a search engine that works, but also online maps complete with Ajax goodness, satellite views and adorable pushpins.
Apple suing fan sites and Google blacklisting News.com: Apple and Google may inspire ferocious loyalty in their users, but both rival the Bush administration in their obsession with secrecy. So we all should have known that Steve Jobs would eventually file suit against Mac rumor sites. When the lawyers finally hit the fan, the target was the Apple-obsessed teenager who runs Think Secret for accurately predicting the Mac Mini a few days before the official announcement.
For its part, Google told News.com that it wouldn't talk to its reporters for a year after the site ran a story about Google's privacy implications, featuring Googleable information about CEO Eric Schmidt. Google relented after much publicity and, presumably, the realization that News.com (which went so far as to cover Google chefs) planned to include the following line at the end of every Google story: "Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story."
Yahoo helping China jail a journalist: China is big. Very big. China is getting rich. Very rich. Tech companies want in. Very in. Google already knuckled under to the Chinese government by removing banned news sites from the Chinese version of Google News, offering the excuse that users would be frustrated to see links to news stories they could not read.
So it was inevitable that some American company would kowtow to Chinese authorities and help them catch a dissident. Yahoo won that race, helping China imprison journalist Shi Tao for 10 years. His crime? Using Yahoo to e-mail a New York-based democracy group. To which we can only say, Yahoo!
The Sony CD rootkit scandal: Big media companies have grown increasingly paranoid about peer-to-peer file sharing, and when they tried to fight back by sticking copy-protection software on music CDs, they were foiled by users holding down the Shift key.
So it should have come as no surprise that some company would eventually resort to the black-hat tactic of surreptitiously installing spyware to prevent users from ripping MP3s. After howls of outrage and a spate of lawsuits, Sony released an uninstaller that left users' browsers vulnerable to hackers. Unfortunately, we cannot say that additional helping of incompetence from a company once cool enough to invent the Walkman was predictable.
Podcasting's popularity: Given the length of Americans' commutes and the domination of drive-time radio by annoying shock jocks and payola-driven pabulum, predicting that program-it-yourself radio would take off should have been a no-brainer.
Government regulation chokes telephony innovation: With the support of old-school telecoms worried about losing customers to upstart internet telephony companies, the FCC mandated that VOIP providers find a way to enable 911 calling and government wiretaps. While the pioneers hastened to adjust to the vague technological mandates, the big players and cable companies launched their own offerings.
When the FCC's Nov. 28 deadline came for VOIP companies to implement the not-so-simple 911 capability, two of the best-known insurgents, Vonage and VoicePulse, had to stop taking new customers.
Secure flight still grounded: Nearly three years after it was first announced, Secure Flight (neé CAPPS II), a proposed new airline screening database, has yet to replace the old watch list system. This year, the Transportation Security Administration failed a government audit of the program's effectiveness and privacy protections, then followed that up with revelations that it violated the Privacy Act by creating a secret database full of details on 250,000 American citizens.
Given the TSA's history of secret databases and misleading statements to Congress and the media, this should have been near the top of the list for predictable stories of 2005.
Corporate data leaks: Thanks to a California disclosure law that went into effect in 2004, millions of Americans got letters from big corporations in 2005, notifying them that their sensitive data had been lost or stolen.
Data broker ChoicePoint, known for peddling its databases to government agencies, set the stage in February when it notified some 145,000 Americans that the company had sold sensitive data about them to scam artists. But LexisNexis, Bank of America, UC Berkeley, the FDIC, Polo Ralph Lauren and MasterCard, among others, all got in on the data leak action in 2005.
Given how often Americans are asked by big bureaucracies for personal information and how aggressively companies like to keep, use and sell that information, we all should have seen this torrent of leaks coming the day the California law went into effect.
Courtesy : Ryan Singel, wired news
But just as often, hindsight counsels that a story was so obviously bound to happen that reporters should have filed their copy months before the event actually occurred, just as obituary writers do for aging celebrities.
Here's a collection of 2005 tech stories that, in retrospect, were thoroughly predictable.
The video iPod: Of course Apple would unveil a portable video player. All the signs were present. As with the music-only iPod, other companies had long been selling similar wares. In fact, Archos introduced a mobile video TV recorder 18 months ago.
Apple garnered mammoth media attention in October when Steve Jobs unveiled the company's gorgeous device, which can't record but will happily play back episodes of The Tonight Show that users buy through iTunes for $2 a pop.
Google Maps: In retrospect, how did anyone bear using MapQuest's clunky interface, and why didn't we all realize that dragging a map would feel so good?
Of course, the geniuses at Google recognized that every American's birthright includes not only a search engine that works, but also online maps complete with Ajax goodness, satellite views and adorable pushpins.
Apple suing fan sites and Google blacklisting News.com: Apple and Google may inspire ferocious loyalty in their users, but both rival the Bush administration in their obsession with secrecy. So we all should have known that Steve Jobs would eventually file suit against Mac rumor sites. When the lawyers finally hit the fan, the target was the Apple-obsessed teenager who runs Think Secret for accurately predicting the Mac Mini a few days before the official announcement.
For its part, Google told News.com that it wouldn't talk to its reporters for a year after the site ran a story about Google's privacy implications, featuring Googleable information about CEO Eric Schmidt. Google relented after much publicity and, presumably, the realization that News.com (which went so far as to cover Google chefs) planned to include the following line at the end of every Google story: "Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story."
Yahoo helping China jail a journalist: China is big. Very big. China is getting rich. Very rich. Tech companies want in. Very in. Google already knuckled under to the Chinese government by removing banned news sites from the Chinese version of Google News, offering the excuse that users would be frustrated to see links to news stories they could not read.
So it was inevitable that some American company would kowtow to Chinese authorities and help them catch a dissident. Yahoo won that race, helping China imprison journalist Shi Tao for 10 years. His crime? Using Yahoo to e-mail a New York-based democracy group. To which we can only say, Yahoo!
The Sony CD rootkit scandal: Big media companies have grown increasingly paranoid about peer-to-peer file sharing, and when they tried to fight back by sticking copy-protection software on music CDs, they were foiled by users holding down the Shift key.
So it should have come as no surprise that some company would eventually resort to the black-hat tactic of surreptitiously installing spyware to prevent users from ripping MP3s. After howls of outrage and a spate of lawsuits, Sony released an uninstaller that left users' browsers vulnerable to hackers. Unfortunately, we cannot say that additional helping of incompetence from a company once cool enough to invent the Walkman was predictable.
Podcasting's popularity: Given the length of Americans' commutes and the domination of drive-time radio by annoying shock jocks and payola-driven pabulum, predicting that program-it-yourself radio would take off should have been a no-brainer.
Government regulation chokes telephony innovation: With the support of old-school telecoms worried about losing customers to upstart internet telephony companies, the FCC mandated that VOIP providers find a way to enable 911 calling and government wiretaps. While the pioneers hastened to adjust to the vague technological mandates, the big players and cable companies launched their own offerings.
When the FCC's Nov. 28 deadline came for VOIP companies to implement the not-so-simple 911 capability, two of the best-known insurgents, Vonage and VoicePulse, had to stop taking new customers.
Secure flight still grounded: Nearly three years after it was first announced, Secure Flight (neé CAPPS II), a proposed new airline screening database, has yet to replace the old watch list system. This year, the Transportation Security Administration failed a government audit of the program's effectiveness and privacy protections, then followed that up with revelations that it violated the Privacy Act by creating a secret database full of details on 250,000 American citizens.
Given the TSA's history of secret databases and misleading statements to Congress and the media, this should have been near the top of the list for predictable stories of 2005.
Corporate data leaks: Thanks to a California disclosure law that went into effect in 2004, millions of Americans got letters from big corporations in 2005, notifying them that their sensitive data had been lost or stolen.
Data broker ChoicePoint, known for peddling its databases to government agencies, set the stage in February when it notified some 145,000 Americans that the company had sold sensitive data about them to scam artists. But LexisNexis, Bank of America, UC Berkeley, the FDIC, Polo Ralph Lauren and MasterCard, among others, all got in on the data leak action in 2005.
Given how often Americans are asked by big bureaucracies for personal information and how aggressively companies like to keep, use and sell that information, we all should have seen this torrent of leaks coming the day the California law went into effect.
Courtesy : Ryan Singel, wired news