Happy New Year to all of you that are regular readers of this blog and to those of you who might be coming to it the first time.  May 2008 be a happy year for everyone.  I can promise that it will be another year of upheaval and change, probably exceeding 2007 in that regard.  I will submit to you my annual predictions, both general and specific, for the year within the next two weeks.  Right now I would like to take a quick look at several late in the year developments of 2007 that provide indication as to where we are going and what will lay ahead for us in 2008. 

As I have stated here several times, a fundamental aspect of being a futurist is to look for patterns to discern the dynamics that will shape our collective future.  Events, inventions, social, cultural and economic developments, trailblazing efforts by individuals and small groups, when looked at collectively can reveal underlying patterns and trends, both macro and micro.  Here are some notable developments that point into our future, some of which will be looked at in greater detail in future columns.
Writers’ Strike
 
The writers’ strike in the entertainment business is now two months old. Its’ length, the animosity it has engendered and the immediate consequences of it are significant.  It has within it the seeds of structural and permanent change in the entertainment business. The annual …

 Last week Google announced that the company, and its philanthropic subsidiary, Google.org, would explore research and develop renewable energy.  The goal is to ultimately produce one gigawatt of renewable energy and do so more cheaply that coal-generated electricity, which of course creates vast amounts of CO2.  I was thrilled to read the news reports of this announcement.

As someone who thinks about the future, converting global society to alternative and renewable types of energy and away from fossil fuels is perhaps the top challenge humanity faces.  The way this will get done is through creativity, innovation, technological breakthroughs and non-attachment to existing status quos. Sounds like something that Google is well prepared to do.  (Regular readers know that I have admired Google in the past; click on ‘Google’ in the archives at right).

Of course the traditional reaction to this announcement, mostly from those supposedly insightful “Wall Street Analysts” was to suggest the company was risking corporate focus on its’ core businesses.  Nonsense!  It was these types of conventional pundits that, a century ago suggested that the railroad companies were in the railroad and not transportation businesses.  Flying people in airplanes, nah, you guys are in the train business.  Using all your right of way real estate for development?  Nah, stick to the train business.

As readers of this column know, I have often …

Google has now made the long awaited announcement that it would be entering the wireless arena.  It was not a product, or “Google Phone” roll-out, but rather the announcement of OHA, or the Open Handset Alliance.  OHA(my choice to come up with an acronym as the full name sounds a bit too bureaucratic and almost Orwellian for me to type it a lot) is the next step in the globalization of connectivity and something I have anticipated and expected for a couple of years.

On this blog, and at conferences I point to the fact that it is the cell phone that is the true global technology. I have written about the explosive growth and sheer numbers of devices, of the technological innovation and how the cell phone has found a seat at the table of major media.  OHA takes the logical next step which is to break up the walled gardens of carriers and software suppliers.  Incompatibility is at odds with a world of  ever increasing connectedness.  Universality is one of the touch stones of our wireless future.  Another is the ongoing commoditization of the entire business pushing costs ever lower for the consumer.  OHA will facilitate both of these inevitable trends.

Google of course is doing this for business reasons.  They hope to dominate the mobile advertising marketplace the way they currently dominate the on-line one.  In addition, they seem to have a strong desire to attack the business constructs of Microsoft and other companies that sell …

To quote from one of the four prior posts with this title:

“While in many areas it might be difficult to see into the future, in the area of technology the future can be readily seen.  The speed of technological invention and innovation moves so quickly that we have barely assimilated a recent breakthrough when another shows up to knock us back on our heels again.  While these innovations do provide a glimpse of our future, they can be disorienting in that they show us that the Present that we are struggling to accept and assimilate will soon be outdated.”

Cloud computing is the name given to the rapidly growing movement of software and storage onto the web. Rather than having all of ones’ software, documents, pictures and email files stashed on the hard drive of a desk top or notebook computer, it will soon be possible to have all of ones digital life reside on a secure place on the web.  While on-line back-up has been around for a while, the breakthrough for cloud computing is that the software one uses will be on the web, not in the computer.  This is the high level battleground between the decades’ old PC model of Microsoft and the more recent Net-centric vision of Google.

Perhaps Bill Gate’s most famous quote is his founding vision for Microsoft:  “A PC on every desktop”.  The manifestation of that vision is the world domination of the Microsoft Empire.  Whether one likes Microsoft or not, this manifested vision helped …