Toothless Chic & Hand Drawn Clouds – Wacky Predictions, 2010 Edition – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #61

This week we’re back with our 2nd (or 3rd depending on how you count ’em) wacky predictions show. John and I welcome back the wacky predictions panel from last year, Dave Rosenberg and Matt Ray for a loose and fun screed-out of crazy things that might happen, most based on absolutely no good sense, rationality, or anything to indicate that you should taken them seriously.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Show notes:

• We start by review the 2009 wacky predictions (based on show notes), a surprising amount of which came to some form of fruition. I must not have put the wackier ones in the show notes.
• Microsoft kills Windows Mobile. This makes us layout: Microsoft forks Android.
• Microsoft’s retails stores will be successful.
• Amazon spins off a private cloud. As part of this, Dave says IBM gets a a cloud, Coté says Amazon partners with IBM or HP (or Snorkle?) to do a container box cloud.
• VMWare ships a private cloud in a container.
• The cult of the physical, a virtualization backlash.
• Unified computing thing seems popular
• Big competitor to Visio – the rise of hand-drawn diagrams
• Somebody buys Rackspace, Microsoft or Cisco, or VMWare/EMC.
• Dave: Eucalyptus is not going to have a business – something is going to have to have to happen. Cloudera will have a hard time.
• On the NoSQL camp in general: they’ll have to take on traditional BI tools to “have a shot.” Matt says they’ll get co-opted by existing vendors.
• Geo-location causes a mass controversy. Social networking privacy problems.
• RFID tags on everything – CueCat 2.0 with Google scanning code.
• A says revolt against celebrity, reality-tv driven culture. Meat-and-potatoes 2.0 – but John says this is more 2011.
• Return of textile manufacturing to the US…but unfortunately it’ll be domestic robots.
• Buffalo becomes the io mega of the 2010’s.
• Apple won’t do a netbook, but they’ll do a big ass iPod Touch.
• Kazookeylele boot-straps that domestic manufacturing.
• Twitter: gets revenue, coffee machine gets Twitter.
• Google starts to get on thin anti-trust issues.
• Snorkle whacky predictions – Microsoft buys MySQL.
• Either the death of the $500M+ acquisition, or $1B becomes the acquisition floor.
• BMC buys Puppet and Chef both. Cisco buys lots of stuff, as does IBM. HP gets acquired.
• Someone tries to acquire Canonical, doesn’t happen – then goes to CentOS.

Full Transcript

(As this recording was 4 folks, one on a phone line, the transcript is not perfect, but it’s certainly more than good enough. –Coté)

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! It’s the 11th of December, 2009. This is the annual IT Management & Cloud Podcast, Wacky Predictions episode. This is one of your regular co-hosts, Michael Coté, available at peopleoverprocess.com. We have got a giant roster relatively, not that they’re tall, but there is a large quantity of people. Why don’t we start with the other usual regular co-host, phoning in, as it were?

John Willis: That would be John M. Willis at JohnMWillis.com.

Michael Coté: How about the pulled pork guy?

Dave Rosenberg: Dave Rosenberg over here. I am on cnet.com/software-interrupted.

Michael Coté: I think it’s worth mentioning that between now and the past, you are also in the hoodie business, right?

Dave Rosenberg: Yes, as a matter of fact, I make most of my money these days selling hooded sweatshirt on the streets of San Francisco. It’s kind of a sad list, it’s really what happened.

Michael Coté: Well, I mean, if you were going to sell one piece of apparel in the Bay area, I think that’s what makes them a millionaire.

John Willis: Exactly. That’s what I am working towards.

Michael Coté: And how about my fellow Austinite?

Matt Ray: This is Matt Ray, I am at LeastResistance.net. I am the guy from Zenoss.

Michael Coté: So we had the same panel last year to go over our Wacky Predictions, and just to — I mean, essentially what we are going to do here is kind of revisit the ones we remember from last year, with the excellent photographic memories that we all have. And then I think we are going to lay out what our Wacky Predictions are for 2010.

Just to set the baseline, essentially the idea, the reason we call it Wacky, not only because we like to use silly words, but it’s fine and enjoyable to have sort of like sane, reasonable predictions of things that are going to happen, but it starts to be a lot more enjoyable when you just kind of throw all care to the wind and just go crazy and have wacky predictions. So we will probably have a mix of the two of those.

But I think last year we had a good time just going nuts, like we probably predicted all sorts of three-letter companies buying each other and crazy things like that. But that’s kind of what’s going on there.

So without further ado, although I would love to hear more about the delicious pulled pork sandwich Dave ate earlier today.

Dave Rosenberg: Weren’t we wrong on very prediction last year?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: I think so, I think so.

Dave Rosenberg: Except for the Open Source startups’ one, where there was some consolidation, because we did see that, but not —

Michael Coté: I will put a link in the show notes to last year, and let me read the way that we summarized it. This was before the wonderful world of transcription, so who knows what we actually said. But our first one was, Apple launches its own Cloud, which I don’t think that really happened. Let’s see, a net celebrity lives off their iPhone for a year.

Male Speaker: Who cares?

Michael Coté: What about like Ashton Kutcher in the Twitter link, does that count?

Male Speaker: He is like a BlackBerry guy, isn’t he?

Dave Rosenberg: Well, there was Twitter, maybe we just used the word iPhone when we should have used the word Twitter.

Male Speaker: Yeah.

Male Speaker: Twitter.

Dave Rosenberg: I am going to say we were right on that one.

Male Speaker: We were right. I take it.

Dave Rosenberg: We got the US government right. US government website is getting the IT (?) — I think we couldn’t have been more right on that one.

John Willis: That’s right, absolutely.

Michael Coté: To add some commentary, and John and I have talked about this in a couple of episodes, like I have been shocked at like how hip the U.S. government is to these crazy new technologies, all this Clouds. Now, I don’t know if they are actually using it, or if it’s just an excuse to build more $18 million Drupal sites and things like that, but at least there is a lot of conferences and interests that they are having. So that’s kind of interesting. Well, we are getting smarter as we go down this list. I am feeling charged. Then we had, let’s see, Amazon starts a marketplace for virtual goods.

Male Speaker: Way off. We missed that one, big time.

Michael Coté: Yeah. And a major Cloud data break occurs. Well, we did have the Sidekick thing, which for the Cloud apologist was not correctly categorized as a Cloud thing, but certainly in the news was —

Male Speaker: But we had downtime from Cloud services as well as services that come in the Cloud.

Male Speaker: Rack space.

Male Speaker: Yeah.

Male Speaker: Rack space, that’s some huge —

Male Speaker: Amazon, Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook, Azure was out for 22 hours.

Male Speaker: Some Gmail outages.

Male Speaker: Gmail, there you go, so we were right on that one.

Male Speaker: Yeah.

Male Speaker: Fantastic!

Male Speaker: We were more right on that one than we had originally thought even.

Michael Coté: And then Google buys Yahoo! or maybe Viacom.

Male Speaker: Or whatever.

Male Speaker: Or something. And instead, if I remember, they bought some company that lets you edit text in tangent, AppJet or whatever.

Male Speaker: Is there a that.

Michael Coté: There you go.

Male Speaker: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Although there was NBC buying — or Comcast buying NBC, that’s exciting, in a, that kind of crap never works kind of way. It sort of like brings up like the old Time Warner-AOL thing, which —

Male Speaker: — which would be the converse of that, Time Warner finally got rid of AOL.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I guess, it did sort of bring the creation of Firefox. So maybe we will get some good out of it, we will see.

Then open source startups begin to consolidate as they miss numbers. There was, I guess, some amount of that. This happened.

Male Speaker: It happened.

Michael Coté: There’s been a massive amount of hand ringing about open source stuff being — I don’t know, sort of a valid business model for startups I guess.

Male Speaker: Well, I think they missed numbers, so the IT management space clearly hectic (?) but SpringSource in to — I mean, I think we were dead-on there, right?

Michael Coté: I guess so. These predictions aren’t so wacky. Maybe we’ll call them the sane predictions. Then we had, let’s see, the return of paying for software, even at a low cost.

Male Speaker: We predicted the App Store, we’re awesome.

Michael Coté: I think that was a bit — the future is going to look a lot like the past kind of prediction.

Male Speaker: Oh darn, I thought that one would have been real good, okay.

Michael Coté: Yeah. And then Amazon buys DHL. Who came up with that one?

Male Speaker: That was me. That was a long shot.

Male Speaker: Wasn’t DHL bankrupt or something?

Michael Coté: Yeah, they were, yeah. It’s still not that far out of the realm of possibility, it really isn’t.

Male Speaker: Are they still bankrupt?

Michael Coté: No.

Male Speaker: They are still around.

Michael Coté: Well, but Amazon’s logistics are so amazing at this point, why would they just not — I guess, why, because they are smarter than to know to get into that kind of business, just like bricks and mortar.

Male Speaker: Well, there is that guy with the whiteboard talking about Brown all the time on TV, what’s that guy’s deal?

Male Speaker: Isn’t he like?

Male Speaker: It doesn’t work for me.

Male Speaker: That guy actually — he got real pissed off at Delta. I don’t know where I saw that, but he was like furious with Delta because they wouldn’t let him sit next to his kids or something like that.

Michael Coté: That guy who does those commercials?

Male Speaker: Yeah, yeah. There is this whole blog thing, where he is like pissed off at Delta, and he will never fly Delta again until they give him a formal apology, and Delta won’t do it. He starts —

Dave Rosenberg: That’s how I feel about those, I am that guy, I am that UPS guy and you screwed me, I feel that way about the sons of bitches at Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco, which is my favorite coffee, but they are such pretentious twats, that I refuse to go there until I get a formal apology from them.

Male Speaker: What did they do?

Dave Rosenberg: If you believe this, they won’t let you take an espresso to go, or what do they call it, a macchiato, whatever, you are not allowed to take the drinks to go, because it might interrupt the experience.

Michael Coté: Here is a non-tech wacky prediction, before we get to the last item. I think in 2010, we are going to see the rise of food fascism, where there is like this like vegan level of like militicism when it comes to like various things about your food, just like you are talking about.

Dave Rosenberg: But that already seems to have passed, because out here it’s always a big thing in the Bay area, all the pseudo-foodies and whatever, but Tony Bourdain and that guy David, from Momofuku, like swat everyone down for being overly pretentious, and it seemed to have worked. I follow the food blogs, because I have such little else in my life.

Michael Coté: Well, maybe us mainstream yokels will —

Dave Rosenberg: That’s what it is. I mean, I can see it’s going to be like barbecue war, but for real, like Texas versus Alabama or whatever.

Michael Coté: That’s right. We’ll get some —

Dave Rosenberg: Everyone else lags behind San Fransisco, so we will get to be foodies next year.

Michael Coté: That’s right. We are already done with that. We are on top of things. Some math. We are bringing it back from like Arkansas. We got bummed out with middle America taking the lead on us, so now it’s drugs again here.

Michael Coté: That’s right, toothless chic that’s what’s it’s all about out there.

Male Speaker: That is absurd, outsider art.

Male Speaker: I will be selling that toothless chic hooded sweatshirt probably of Wednesday the next week.

Michael Coté: That’s right, that’s right. So our last prediction from last year, which I think, this worked out pretty well, is that Netbooks are going to become low cost thin clients. I don’t think anyone phrases them as thin clients, but Netbooks sure are. Like I was just looking over — a post that I was working on before we were recording this, I was validating my anecdotal thing that Netbooks are popular, and they seem to have an increasing — like people are buying that stuff, which is exciting for them, I guess. With that, there’s last year’s predictions. Now, so, who wants to start off with the Wacky Prediction for 2010?

Male Speaker: I got one.

Michael Coté: Alright.

Male Speaker: I say that Microsoft kills Windows Mobile.

Michael Coté: That’s a good one.

Male Speaker: Or not so much kills it, but they make a dramatic change, including the core of what it’s based on.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Yeah it was —

Male Speaker: Based on BlackBerry?

Male Speaker: Yeah. It makes more sense.

Dave Rosenberg: I am pushing for Androids. I mean, I am pushing heavily that Android is the obvious answer, because then they could fork it, which gives Google such — gives the finger to Google in such a huge way, and takes advantage of all the work that Google and Motorola and all these guys have already done.

Michael Coté: Oh Dave, that’s a good one, Microsoft forks Android, there you go.

Dave Rosenberg: That’s number one on the list. Actually, Microsoft would probably fork right Palm Pre instead.

Michael Coté Well, I blogged about this yesterday that I thought — I said Microsoft should buy Palm and at least get Web OS, but a fork of Android is genius, because it’s the ultimate FU.

Male Speaker: Well, that’s why they built the wrong one.

Michael Coté Well, right, exactly. I was talking with some people about Microsoft the other day, and we didn’t get to this part of the conversation, but they were saying, it’s always fun when you get a bunch of like industry gasbags, like myself together, and we talk about Oracle versus IBM, versus Microsoft, and how nice or un-nice those various people are.

People were characterizing Microsoft as very aggressive, though not so much as Oracle and I was thinking like — there’s always like two or three Microsoft products you can bring up, and it totally like brings a dour face over there otherwise very chipper and aggressive face. At the moment Windows Mobile for them, unfortunately, kind of one of those things, and Vista was that thing for a long time.

So yeah, it seems like they want to do something with Mobile; I mean they have to, but man, forking Android, that would be fantastic. Do you guys actually like use Android?

Dave Rosenberg: I did. I got a loaner of the Droid, whatever. And I actually kind of like — I mean, first of all it’s on Verizon, so that means I can make a call, unlike my iPhone, which is useless as a phone in San Francisco, and even in New York it sucked too.

But the thing with the Droid stuff is like, the Operating System is totally usable. The form factor on the Droid is still a little bit off, the keys are a little bit off, but there is a bunch of hacks for a lot of stuff. The challenge that I ran into was that, I wanted to — you can jail break it pretty easily, and people have already gotten the Rootkits on there, but you can’t really hack it. I mean, you can’t really go build an app and go get it on your phone and distribute it widely.

There is a lot of weird intricacies associated with these things, especially with the FCC and the way that it works with the 911 calls and such. So the SDKs, they only let you do certain things. So it’s kind of — it will be interesting to see how Google deals with this, and if someone else comes along and says, well, we are going to be the certified — if they are going to be the rel (?), right, if Google is Linux, and somebody else goes and does the enterprise version, that part I think will be interesting to watch, but I don’t know that there is any money there, unless you are a content provider.

Michael Coté That’s the weird thing about like elder tech companies in the mobile spaces, like Apple aside, they are like so reluctant to get their hands dirty with day-to-day retail operations, like exactly what you are talking about, where whether it’s like being responsible for taxes across 50 states and then the whole globe or whatever. They have got to get over that hump or they are just going to be relegated to being suppliers versus the kind of more — I don’t know, the more dominant face of technology that they are nowadays.

Male Speaker: Correct.

Michael Coté But you know, as a excellent segment, that was one of my segue, using Microsoft, one of my Wacky Predictions, and I have to be honest I think this is more wacky than whatever you said. Microsoft’s retail stores, I think they are going to be phenomenally successful, that’s my Wacky Prediction.

Male Speaker: What are you basing this wack on?

Michael Coté I am basing that on the fact that we are doing wacky predictions.

Male Speaker: I don’t know. The thing that I don’t understand about that is, like if you look at Apple, they sell Apple products, and there is so many vendors that create Windows, or whatever, PCs that run Windows, like how could you know that the one — I don’t know it’s just weird, it seems like a real kick in the nuts to the rest of your licensees when you do something like that. They are not going to have 100 different laptops there, it doesn’t even make sense.

Male Speaker: Isn’t it just HP stuff?

Male Speaker: Is it?

Male Speaker: I think so.

Male Speaker: I don’t know man.

Male Speaker: I only run Ubuntu like John M. Willis.

Michael Coté I mean, you know, they have got Xbox, they have got a lot of like fun hardware. They have got like a $200 wireless keyboard. They have got like 50 different versions of Windows 7, for home desk office use. Like they have a lot of stuff, I don’t know —

Male Speaker: I don’t think that that’s that wacky.

Michael Coté Although, you know, to be fair, I do remember, and Matt Ray might remember this too, like I remember, off 183, that we used to have this Gateway Store, which like languished forever, and there were a couple of — people have tried to do this before, and Apple has been the only one who has really been successful at it.

Male Speaker: Yeah, the Gateway Stores were terribly —

Dave Rosenberg: The cow print, they had the giant cow print. There was one in Colma, which is next to Daly City, which is next to San Francisco, the only —

Male Speaker: What’s that John?

John Willis: I have not even seen a Microsoft store.

Michael Coté Well, I don’t think they have opened up yet, but they are suppose to open by 2010, hence the predictive nature of the prediction.

John Willis: Hey, I have got one, it’s Cloud related. Amazon spins a Private Cloud.

Michael Coté Now, what would that look like exactly? I mean, don’t they already have Private Clouds?

John Willis: No.

Michael Coté With their VPN madness, I am kind of playing.

John Willis: No, not that. I think kind of a Eucalyptus type thing, where they actually — this is wacky, because everybody would say this is wacky, but it would be cool if they did it in some ways. They actually kind of spun off a version of what they have, to where they actually could sell it as a three tierish or Eucalyptusish, so somebody could take a running version of an Amazon kind of —

Michael Coté I have got to check this out, I noticed that —

Dave Rosenberg: I think IBM is going to do that.

Michael Coté I noticed that there is this —

John Willis: IBM doesn’t have a Cloud, probably tough to do.

Dave Rosenberg: Oh, they will buddy, just you wait.

Michael Coté But check it out, here is what I am saying is like —

John Willis: So you are predicting that IBM is going to have a Cloud in 2010?

Dave Rosenberg: I am.

John Willis: Okay, there you go. That’s a wacky prediction.

Michael Coté See, I think here is the bridge. I have noticed that HP and IBM, they have got these container data centers now, so maybe Amazon like partners with IBM or HP and their Private Cloud is a container that gets shipped to you.

Dave Rosenberg: That’s pretty cool, I like that.

Michael Coté So do you think that Amazon — Amazon is going to do a Private Cloud, but you don’t mean an internal, like an enterprise Cloud, right.

John Willis: No, I think they would create an software that you could run, just like download and run and install in your own enterprise, that would run identical — would be basically modeled identically after the Amazon. It would be a brilliant move if they did it, they would put — they would just pretty much own the Cloud market across the border.

Michael Coté Yeah, they would crush everything.

John Willis: They would, they would, totally.

Dave Rosenberg: Well, I have got a wack prediction to go with that, VMware is going to ship Private Cloud in a tractor trailer, in a container.

Male Speaker: But I think my prediction —

Male Speaker: (Voice Overlap).

Dave Rosenberg: There was big break up there. One of my other predictions was that there is going to be a virtualization backlash.

Michael Coté Do you think there is going to be like the cult of the physical?

Dave Rosenberg: I do, yeah.

Michael Coté Now, why is there going to be a backlash, lay out the foundation for us?

Dave Rosenberg: I think somewhere down the line, just like — I don’t if you saw Savio Rodrigues did the math on Linux versus Windows running on Amazon, and Windows actually came out to be cheaper. I think that with the new chips, I think Intel is going to come out with a chip that’s going to end up being — it’s going to be cheaper and easier to just run your own — either run it in a data center, or run it in your own infrastructure, then it’s going to be to bother with virtualization, you are just better off getting more machines.

John Willis: So you wouldn’t run virtualization in your own environment?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, you will just say, forget it, I will just run these cheapo, super cheapo blades, or these multi-multi-core chips, and just say, forget the virtualization software, because it slows everything down.

Michael Coté Hey, it’s wacky. Come on, it’s wacky.

John Willis: Yeah, it’s wacky, but the problem is they need a foundation model to do the provisioning then, right?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, but they will solve that, there is ways to solve these things.

Michael Coté Those are just small details.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Michael Coté Basically they will just get a rack of like $100 Netbooks, and duct tape them together with some Ethernet cord, and then, boom, you are set — you use like a diesel generator so you can properly meter the energy consumption.

Dave Rosenberg: Well, I mean, what’s the performance that we need as virtualization, it’s pretty significant. I mean, I think you get a lot more out of the resource, but performance side is better than 25%. And so somewhere down the line — like I have looked at this a pretty good amount to try and figure out why — people keep using more and more virtualization, because they think they are getting more out of their resources. They are using less physical space with virtualization, they are not actually getting more computing power in the whole thing. So I don’t know, it’s a wacky one.

John Willis: Actually, we need to cut you off, because that’s not too wacky actually.

Male Speaker: Alright, I’ll stop, that’s a business model. Somebody call Sand Hill Road and tell him I will be right down.

John Willis: No, because actually, I mean that fits with this whole commoditization where I think there is going to be a pullback from public cloud to private cloud, because the hardware is just going to be so — I mean, pod based, and these kind of small versions of shipping containers, and I think that it’s going to — I think all the value that we have today with Public Clouds are going to kind of swing back to private infrastructure.

Michael Coté: On that topic let me ask you guys this, having come from the IBM Systems and Technology Analysts Summit this week, the hardware people. They were like really big on this unified computing sort of thing, their version of it was integrated computing, if you will. And that kind of sounds like a little bit of what you are getting at John is that, you get these kind of specialized boxes, if you will, whether they are sort of Private Cloud boxes, or the kind of like the duct taped Netbooks or whatever, and for some reason, I don’t know, you get these more integrated devices instead of generic ones.

So anyways, we had some connection problem there, but let me re-summarize. I was just saying, over at the IBM event, they were all onto this like integrated unified computing thing, like what is that, the Cisco unified compute box.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, UCS.

Michael Coté: Is that kind of what you guys are getting to?

Dave Rosenberg: That’s some hot stuff. I mean, like two years ago I would have said that, that was just so stupid, like why wouldn’t you just go build the thing, but now it’s like, yeah, maybe it’s okay. What’s happened to me? The sweatshirts.

Michael Coté: So it sounds like you guys like the unified computing idea or integrated or whatever.

John Willis:Well, I don’t, I don’t.

Dave Rosenberg: It’s still a bad model. It’s a bad technical —

John Willis:(Voice Overlap), speaking of non-virtual, but I mean, I think I Dave’s prediction of really going back, using commodity hardware to kind of componentize solutions without virtualization. But I think like what’s going on in Cloud virtualization that you could see more of the physical things turn software based. And I think that there is just some exciting things with virtual switches.

So I don’t know about all the physical hardware coupled together, where I think that we start talking about expanding large clusters of machines, I think you are going to see more of the software handle the kind of — the data as a service, you are going to see the software handle the kind of virtual networking and two type stuff and basic commodity compute model.

Dave Rosenberg: I have got another wacky one for you. I think there is going to be a competitor to Visio.

Michael Coté: Visio, like the Microsoft diagram tool?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I think that that’s going to be a big one.

Matt Ray: How about OmniGraffle, cross-platform OmniGraffle? You heard it here first.

Michael Coté: OmniGraffle?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah. I don’t know, but I mean a meaningful one. If you look at like — everything still looks like Visio. Like you look at any of this Cloud crap, or any of these like DIY, put your infrastructure together, it still looks like Visio, and it looks like people are using Visio for it.

Michael Coté: I think what’s going to happen is there is going to be people who use paper and pen and scanners. HP is going to spend a lot of money to promote scanner use again, and everything is going to be hand diagrammed. It’s going to be like the shiny round cornered drop shadow thing that’s popular in diagrams now, instead it’s going to be like, dude, if you don’t have hand drawn diagrams, obviously you are not technologically innovative.

Matt Ray: I love it. That’s good.

John Willis:So you need to go back to calculators too.

Matt Ray: Those pens, where you draw on the paper and it’s automatically put on your screen, don’t you have one of those?

Michael Coté: I actually have two of those. I have a really old one.

Matt Ray: And how has that taken off?

Michael Coté: Oh, it was fantastic when I was on Windows, and then — and pardon my mini rant here, I am like paper to image things. But all of those things never work on Mac. And you would think, if there is this cliché that creative people use Mac, not myself included, then wouldn’t that be your primary audience? But no, these pens are always only Windows compatible. And actually I have got this Logitech I/O pen, and then at the Silverlight 3 launch event, I got this other thing called Papershow, and I haven’t — despite of having a Vista box, I haven’t even tried it yet. So there you go, hand drawn diagrams. We are set.

John Willis:I think somebody buys RockSpace next year.

Matt Ray: I think you are right, Microsoft.

John Willis:Those are still wacky.

Matt Ray: But let’s go with Microsoft is going to buy it, or somebody like that. I mean, who needs to own that? I think Microsoft. It won’t be IBM.

Michael Coté: Why not?

Matt Ray: Because they have data centers. They are not going to buy one that they —

John Willis:Cisco.

Matt Ray: Cisco, I think, is a decent possibility, yeah.

John Willis:Or VMware, VMC maybe, I don’t know, VMC, VMware

Matt Ray: VMC is a good possibility too. But I don’t think that that’s wacky. I think that’s a good one.

Michael Coté: How about that, son of a bitch, maybe we will be right again.

Male Speaker: What about — let’s go for some of the less popular things.

John Willis:(Voice Overlap).

Male Speaker: I am going to give you two that are not going to necessarily go over well. First one is that I think Eucalyptus is not going to have a business, as much as I like that. And I don’t think they will go out of business, but I think something has to happen. And I think that Cloudera is going to have a hard time next year. I think they are not going to be the belle of the ball that they were this year. I support those guys and I am friends with them, but I just think that it’s been a little bit too easy thus far, and it can’t go on forever.

Male Speaker: Yeah. You know, I was just talking with someone about Cloudera this morning, and it seems like the core problem they have at the moment is sort of like, it sounds really — it’s kind of — when was it that someone asked Kennedy like the — Edward Kennedy why he wanted to run for President and he didn’t really have an answer. It seems like this is kind of like the same dilemma is like, so, we got all this wacky technology and we can sort of like do — we can do analytics and big data stuff cheaper and more faster than we ever could.

And then the question is, so what are we going to do with it? And it seems like that’s sort of like the challenge for like Hadoop and big data people in Cloudera, to go out there and be like, hey, all these boring vertical industries, here is what you can actually do for it, besides like Facebook things.

Male Speaker: Which, will lead in to the NoSQL, I know this is one of John M. Willis’ favorite topics, but I don’t think — I think all those things are going to be dead. They are going to just become crappy, little open source utilities?

John Willis:I don’t think what the — I think that — I don’t know, I think like the TVs and the ones that are gone, I think those are better, those seem to be no-brainers.

Male Speaker: You think those are businesses — I mean, that’s the —

John Willis:Yeah. I mean, the business —

Male Speaker: Because that’s where you are getting it. You are getting it in business versus a project.

Male Speaker: A project could be successful that’s not a business.

John Willis:There are corporations, like I have talked to Deutsche Bank, this idea being able to process data at this scale, the need is there, and the out of the box tools. Here is the prediction. I think that if the NoSQL has a shot, it’s first going to have — in the enterprise, it’s going to have to take on the traditional overblown. That’s where they got to win.

Male Speaker: My prediction is, I think they’ll get co-opted by existing vendors. Rather than somebody else break through, it’ll just be like, hey look, IBM offers CouchDB support now.

Male Speaker: Well, IBM has got a problem. The problem with IBM doing stuff like Hadoop and stuff like that is, especially for BI, the BI players are going to have a big problem, Oracle and IBM. They don’t want — that’s a.

Male Speaker: They have to be ever sleek about it and add it as a feature instead of a rival product, so that you continue to have good sales on both, it seems.

Male Speaker: I can hear you, but I lost — I don’t hear Coté anymore. You are back again.

Male Speaker:             [?].

Male Speaker: We have got this fantastic — my prediction for 2010 is —

Male Speaker: Skype.

Male Speaker: Yeah, exactly, Skype is going to continue to be terrible.

Male Speaker: (Voice Overlap) it’s like $2 billion or some shit that this piece of crap is worth.

Male Speaker: Yeah, you know, there is a prediction we didn’t have last year that eBay would spin out Skype, that was like — that’s sort of like one of those like smart consolidation moves that you would never think would happen.

Male Speaker: But more importantly, I would never have predicted that eBay would have bought Skype and not own the IP.

Male Speaker: That was the most insane thing.

Male Speaker: Oh, is that what happened, I didn’t read?

Male Speaker: Yeah.

Male Speaker: Didn’t they lose money on the deal?

Male Speaker: Oh yeah, there has got to be a good prediction in there somewhere to say that somebody else is going to buy something and then not own it. Let’s pick one. Who is that going to be?

Male Speaker: It would be if it would be those guys again, I am getting pretty good at it.

Male Speaker: Well, but I think it’s going to be somebody who dabbles in like — decides to dabble on open source and gets just completely screwed by the GPL or something.

Male Speaker: You know, Cisco has gotten a little GPL port in the past. They might have learned their lesson, but they are one of the few companies around that, like Cisco and EMC, and there is a handful of others who haven’t really — who haven’t sort of gotten their open source stripes, if you will.

Dave Rosenberg: Right, exactly, which we all know how well that works out for everybody.

Michael Coté: Yeah, there is always that strange —

Dave Rosenberg: It only works out for the companies who get acquired; everybody else gets pretty much soused.

Michael Coté: Yeah, you damn Bay area people and your —

Dave Rosenberg: I listen.

Michael Coté: And acquisition like business models.

Dave Rosenberg: All I do all day long is hope for my alma mater to get acquired.

Michael Coté: That’s right. So starting from the less enterprise, back to the wacky stuff, I think in 2010 we are going to have like our first 24-hour multi-week coverage of someone who got killed or otherwise kidnapped or something terrible happened to him, due to like geolocation technologies. Then there’s going to be like big, geolocation is dangerous for your kids, and we should start passing laws like no texting and driving. Like those things where you have the damn cameras that make a beep when you take a picture all the time, in case you are like the up skirt people or whatever.

Matt Ray: In case I am one of them?

Dave Rosenberg: I am not saying anything. I am going to Japan in February, I will make it happen. But again, that’s not that wacky, but it’s like the same thing of like how everybody is rushed to put all this ridiculous — so here’s one, probably not that wacky, but the Facebook privacy thing is going to sooner or later, it’s so bad, that someone is going to bring a massive lawsuit, its got to happen.

Michael Coté: That’s what I am getting at, and that’s why I think it’s more wacky that it hasn’t happened already, because it’s like so easy to stalk people and track people if you wanted to, and I think unfortunately if someone is going to —

Dave Rosenberg: You faded out there again.

Michael Coté: I just stopped talking.

Dave Rosenberg: So I was just going to say, I went on Facebook for the first time in about two months, because I had all these friend requests that were all spam, of course, and I looked at this thing and I am like, what would possibly compel you to have to put this information out there? I mean Twitter is bad enough, but at least it’s only 140 characters and there’s no photos being exposed to the world.

But people I knew from high school are like, I don’t need to know that your kid just took a shit. It’s absurd, and it just looks to me like — it’s like there’s this whole — and this is a weird one and no comments from any of the around this.

So I work for a company that has a lot to do with tattoo art, and I go out and I see kids at Starbucks and these other places with like shit on their forearms, their necks, and whatever else. And all I am thinking is like, I am never going to hire you, because you are a moron, you can’t make a good decision. And that’s going to happen with this Facebook, MySpace crap. It’s inevitable.

Michael Coté: Oh, I got a good complementary one. There’s going to be anti-tattoo discrimination laws passed, how about that?

Dave Rosenberg: That’s pretty wacky. I like it.

Michael Coté: It would be like, this Rosenberg guy didn’t hire me because I had a dumb tattoo on my neck, I am suing.

Dave Rosenberg: Right. I like it.

Matt Ray: You know the military reversed their ban on forearm tattoos last week.

Michael Coté: Really?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, see.

Matt Ray: Yeah, it’s like you weren’t allowed to have tattoos on your arm used for saluting.

Dave Rosenberg: Wow! That’s pretty interesting.

Matt Ray: And they dropped it so they could hit their recruiting numbers.

Michael Coté: That’s a good one.

Dave Rosenberg: That is a good one.

Michael Coté: So alright, another one I was going to think of, again, I think it’s wacky just because I more or like think it would be cool to happen, is I think we are going to have like RFID tags on everyday common items. Like there’s just going to be like a tipping point that’s finally going to happen.

Dave Rosenberg: I have been saying that for years actually and it hasn’t happened. But you saw the Google — what’s those iCode things, they are pushing that again.

Michael Coté: It’s like CueCat 2.0.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Matt Ray: I love my CueCat. I just can’t wait to use it.

John Willis:I got one. Google also has a DNS service.

Michael Coté: Exactly!

Dave Rosenberg: With unlimited use.

Michael Coté: Yeah, maybe. How about Google opens a retail store? Google buys FedEx Kinko’s and uses that as their footprint for retail.

John Willis: That would be cool.

Dave Rosenberg: No, because they are —

John Willis:I always thought Amazon should open up a big, kind of Borders type store that could be like a playground.

Dave Rosenberg: Those aren’t good businesses though. I mean, it’s like Amazon and Google are smarter.

Matt Ray: Yeah, so some other Amazon could (Voice Overlap).

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, exactly. It doesn’t make any sense on that, but you know what I wonder about, I kind of think somewhere down the line, there’s going to be some — besides the back lashing on Facebook or whatever else, I like to think that somewhere down the line people are going to realize that not everyone needs to be famous, and there’s going to be a backlash, an actual reality backlash. Like the people who broke in to the President’s dinner or whatever, because they wanted to be famous or the Balloon Boy. I mean, everyone wants to be a spectacle if they can somehow get on Reality TV. It’s like, how about if you just got a goddamn job, finish college, whatever it is. Am I being too practical?
Michael Coté: A return of just like — how would you characterize this?

Dave Rosenberg: Commonsense! Let me just — it’s got to be like a celebrity economy.

Michael Coté: It’s sort of like meat-and-potatoes 2.0, that’s what’s going to happen.

John Willis:You know what, I think you are right, but I think that’s 2011.

Dave Rosenberg: That’s fair. I also think that there’s — here’s a really wacky one. I think manufacturing is going to come back to the US.

Michael Coté: How is that going to happen?

John Willis:I like that one, but go ahead.

Dave Rosenberg: I think it’s going to be not computers necessarily or not electronics, but I think a lot of stuff like — there’s a lot of clothes now that are coming back to the US. There’s a lot of like more sort of higher end luxury goods. There is a lot of brands that are coming back, because the math doesn’t workout anymore to outsource it.

There are certain products, like sneakers and electronics and whatever else, that really it makes a lot more sense to ship them out, but hoodies, t-shirts, or whatever else, jeans, people are willing to even pay a premium I think for American made goods again.

Michael Coté: So you think like return of textile manufacturing it sounds like.

Dave Rosenberg: Something, yeah, some sort of physical part will become important again in the US industry.

Matt Ray: But unfortunately domestic robots.

Dave Rosenberg: Well, yeah, of course. My army, I am sampling my army of robots right now. They are making noodles; I am starting with food.

Michael Coté: I predict that we will have a reprise of the, what was it, ‘Halloween III’ movie with the mask, except it will be with hoodies, starting in the Bay area.

Dave Rosenberg: I am wearing the hoodie as we speak.

Michael Coté: You have got to make sure there’s not some tiny computer in it, rigged up to some explosive device.

Dave Rosenberg: Here’s another one for you. I think that we will see a lot more of that company, Buffalo, you know that company that makes those —

Michael Coté: Oh yeah! They are here in Austin, aren’t they?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I think that they are going to become the Iomega of the 2010.

Michael Coté: Iomega, are those zip drive people?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Michael Coté: You know, I think Buffalo does make pretty good stuff.

Dave Rosenberg: It’s fantastic actually, I have two of them, and they are super high quality, but nobody knows of the company, and it seems like they are ripe for a big marketing effort, and more possibly an acquisition. How about that?

Matt Ray: How about speaking of consumer hardware?

Michael Coté: So we are back from recording, and I think another 2010 prediction, I am finally going to figure how to do this f***ing podcasting shit. Already dismissed as a failure. But you were starting to give us a prediction there Matt Ray.

Matt Ray: So we were doing a consumer hardware, and I was saying that Apple won’t do a Netbook, but they will do a big ass iPod Touch to compete with the Kindle and all that stuff.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah?

Dave Rosenberg: I don’t want that to be true.

Matt Ray: I know, me too.

Michael Coté: I tried to get my wife, Kim, I was going to get her — I had the perfect — I thought the perfect idea for a Christmas present, I was going to get her a Kindle, because she likes reading, and it’s also perfect because then I would have an excuse to buy one to play with.

Dave Rosenberg: A Kindle?

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, the Amazon eBook reader thing.

Dave Rosenberg: Oh yeah, I think you are calling it a Kimdle for her name.

Michael Coté: See, that would be sweet. And then I asked her, what do you think of these Kindles, and the first thing she said, as if anticipating my whole scheme was like, we are not getting one of those.

Matt Ray: So when is her birthday?

Michael Coté: Her birthday is February 4.

Matt Ray: I am just saying, not for Christmas.

Michael Coté: See, that’s why you make the big bucks Matt Ray, because one door closes is another door opening. That’s the way you look at the world.

Dave Rosenberg: And get her early for Christmas.

Michael Coté: Or even better, I can get a Christmas discount maybe, if there is any —

Matt Ray: Oh genius!

Dave Rosenberg: I played with one, I think it’s alright, but I mean it’s like — I kind of like a book, maybe I am crazy.

Michael Coté: The thing for me is, I travel a lot nowadays, and I see my fellow like weary business travelers, the one with the Kindles and I think like, it might be nicer to carry a Kindle instead of a book, because one, books are bulky, and two, I am perpetually at this point where I have got like 50 pages to read in a book, and I don’t want to like take that book with me, because I will finish that in one airplane trip, and then I got to lug this damn book around. But then again it’s also like, maybe I had to spend that $300 on like a nice meal or something instead of a stupid Kindle.

Dave Rosenberg: Dude, I got hoodies out the if you need some action.

Michael Coté: Some hoodie action?

John Willis:Well, I want to get a Kindle when they support books on tape.

Michael Coté: As like a podcast?

Matt Ray: They will play MP3s.
Dave Rosenberg: I saw today there is a resurgence of the Keytar, I think that that’s going to be a big thing next year.

Michael Coté: What the hell is a Keytar?

Dave Rosenberg: It’s like a guitar, but it’s a keyboard. Looks like a guitar but is a keyboard.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah!

John Willis: And you have harmonica on it too, right?

Dave Rosenberg: Well, here’s a wacky one.

John Willis: No.

Dave Rosenberg: What’s that?

John Willis: It has harmonica on it too.

Dave Rosenberg: I think so, yeah.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, that’s like a —

John Willis: Oh that’s cool, yeah.

Dave Rosenberg: I am going to go with – I am going to go –

Michael Coté: Now, was that thing called like a Kazookeylele or something?

Dave Rosenberg: Is it what?

Michael Coté: The YouTube has the video, that’s like the Kazoo hooked up to the banjo. And you have seen this video, and he plays like the final countdown on it. And it’s called like a Kazooajol (?) or something but —

John Willis: Yeah, that’s the thing.

Michael Coté: I think connecting back to one of the earlier predictions; I think that’s what’s going to like bootstrap manufacturing back here in the US. It is going to be like the huge demand for the Kazookeylele.

Matt Ray: That domestic innovation.

Michael Coté: And the only way to meet it will be to have people in like rural Kentucky build it for you because they know what that stuff is suppose to sound like and they —

Matt Ray: They probably already have a big stack of them ready to ship.

Michael Coté: It’s ready to go.

Dave Rosenberg: You came full circle on my manufacturing prediction, it worked.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, there you go.

Dave Rosenberg: Here’s what I — here’s another wacky one. I don’t know if we made this last year, but it would seem obvious that at some point in 2010, Twitter finds revenue.

Michael Coté: That is wacky.

Dave Rosenberg: I know.

Michael Coté: And this basically is revenue that doesn’t include them being bought, right?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Uh-huh!

Dave Rosenberg: How about that?

Matt Ray: Here’s a wacky prediction. Someone will build Twitter integration to something that has no place having it, like my DVD Player.

Michael Coté: Oh!

Dave Rosenberg: Oh, that’s good. Oh God! Well, I know that it is very into the network management, I am not making network management tool that spits out tweets, like, oh no! I am about to go down. What?

Michael Coté: May be like my coffee machine will twitter me when that new pot of coffee is ready.

Matt Ray: Exactly!

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Bringing realization to what was the RFC with the coffee machine.

Matt Ray: I don’t know; it was like.

Michael Coté: So when that’s not slightly so wacky, is I think what with like Chrome coming around. I think Google is going to start to get into some like, I see, anti-trust issues coming up in this year. Because it seems like the Justice Department that we have now is like going crazy with anti-trust stuff in the tech-world. And I mean it wasn’t that — that was like the whole stink up with Microsoft, was basically IE and Netscape and doing things with Java and all sorts of business like that. So it’s sort of thin ice to get onto, once you start making your own browser.

Dave Rosenberg: I agree, and I wrote something — I didn’t — did you guys read the same thing from Eric Schmidt where his answer was like, well, if ours is the best then we should have a 100% and everybody else should have to compete with us.

Michael Coté: Yeah.

Dave Rosenberg: I like the of that.

John Willis: Does that mean that Chrome OS will not be able to support or ship a Chrome browser?

Michael Coté: Ah, there you –

Dave Rosenberg: Probably genius!

Michael Coté: These are problems.

Dave Rosenberg: If I was Microsoft, I would go right back, you are exactly right. I would go right back and.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, definitely in Europe, if you bundle a media player in that your port not going to work. There is a bad precedent there.

Matt Ray: So any wacky predictions on what’s going to happen to Sun? We hit that last year.

Michael Coté: Oh, we did. Hey! What did we say last year, do you remember?

Matt Ray: I remember that that I said someone who was going to buy them and break them into pieces, and I don’t think Oracle has gotten the hands on it yet.

Michael Coté: Well, they are definitely going to keep OpenOffice, we know that for sure. I mean OpenOffice and Java Effects according to Larry were the crown jewels if I recall. So there is — you know, but yeah, I mean who knows it’s going to — I never know what the hell is going on with this Snorkle thing. It’s just like a continual like roller-coaster of —

Matt Ray: Well, that’s why it needs some wacky predictions.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, alright, alright.

Dave Rosenberg: It’s depressing.

Michael Coté: Okay, I got it; I am going to go crazy wacky. I don’t even know what I am talking. Microsoft buys MySQL from them.

Dave Rosenberg: I don’t know, if I was Microsoft I’d buy like a — well, not but I’d buy like a Zenoss or somebody who can manage Windows machines, it’s not the worst idea.

Michael Coté: Yeah. They did by Opalis or O-P-A-L-I-S today.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Michael Coté: So it’s interesting. We’ll see what happens.

Dave Rosenberg: What about this prediction. I mean, you know, with the Open Source stuff and the Cloud and all those other kinds of things and no one makes money from Cloud except for Amazon. I wonder if there is going to be a VC backlash that will stop funding all these companies. Like right now, if you have Cloud in your presentation, you can pretty much walk in and they’ll hand you some dollars, but it kind of makes me wonder if it’s all going to go sideways.
Michael Coté Well, you know if you throw in Visio in Cloud, you don’t even need to go present to them, they will give you cash.

Dave Rosenberg: I am working on it right now; I will be going to.

Michael Coté You know I am glad you mentioned that, because that was one of the ones that I couldn’t figure out how to phrase in a good way, but it does seem like the VC world is kind of — people are finally looking for it to like, I don’t know, fail or something.

Dave Rosenberg: You know the model has to change.

John Willis: Well, you know and that’s the thing is — a lot of people said this, but I am just saying is that sooner or later, they are going to hit this brick wall where they are going to have to realize, it’s a services world. And they’ve been living on on it. If you look at their investments, you know, it is kind of like you are talking about the Cloud is a good example, I think that if people have they are going to survive with the services, business model and you are just not going to get those multiples in this space anymore. You are going to have to solve it.

Michael Coté You know I think as part of that, how about this for a wacky prediction, it’s sort of like the end of like the half a billion dollar and more like acquisition.

Dave Rosenberg: No, I disagree with that actually, I think people —

Michael Coté 2010 will never (Voice Overlap).

John Willis: Well, again, the wacky predictions, you are right, but —

Dave Rosenberg: No way, I think there is going to be so few valuable commodities that people are going to pay even more form.

Michael Coté Wow! I like that, that’s a good genus prediction there. I mean faces —

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I am going to go the exact opposites.

Michael Coté: It’s just like a billion and above is your entry price for acquisition.

Dave Rosenberg: Well, think about it, because there is so much consolidation, there is really nothing — what can you buy even? There is maybe 100 truly useful — it depends on, obviously, how you look at it if you are a client for technology or adoption or whatever else, but the reason why Spring and JBoss, and everything else got all that dose, because the adoption. I don’t think you can pick 50 companies, or probably even less, probably 25 companies that have that level of adoption and therefore, you have to do it. It has to become meaningful.

Michael Coté There is some sanity that makes sense.

Dave Rosenberg: I hope so.

John Willis: On that, Puppet guys get a whole bunch of money.

Dave Rosenberg: As an advisor to Puppet Group, I can’t possibly comment on that.

John Willis: (Voice Overlap) Well, I am an advisor of the Chef guys and I hope they get loads and loads of money.

Matt Ray: I am going to predict BMC buys both Puppet and Chef.

Dave Rosenberg: Oh, that’s good. That’s good.

Michael Coté And then in classic Petrol Express style that perhaps only Matt Ray can appreciate, they will have them out to the death and then have a third party come in and kill them both.

John Willis: Yeah, there you go.

Michael Coté And they will forever be known as the BMC innovation model.

Dave Rosenberg: So, who do you think is going to be — make some predictions of who’s going to be the big acquirers of the next year. I mean I don’t think VMware has a whole lot more left in them right now.

Matt Ray: Cisco!

Dave Rosenberg: Cisco?

Michael Coté: Yeah, I think that’s your number one person right there.

Dave Rosenberg: They usually are the big one there. But what about — I mean IBM?

Michael Coté: I think IBM is like getting into these — IBM is trying to sell like they are trying to do the thing where like, hey, that looks like a network, so we can apply the same network software to it, and they are going to have to acquire a whole bunch of non-tech companies and specialized tech companies to do that. So they’ll definitely be buying stuff.

Dave Rosenberg: What about Oracle? They haven’t bought anything since the Sun deal started.

Michael Coté: I don’t know. They are probably snake bitten.

Dave Rosenberg: HP?

Michael Coté They got hurt from staring at the Sun too long.

John Willis: I think wacky prediction, HP gets acquired.

Dave Rosenberg: HP gets acquired. I think somebody even tried years ago. I think one of these big guns will try to acquire, but they can’t, and then CentOS and make CentOS to Red Hat.

Michael Coté CentOS, where did that come from?

John Willis: No, I think somebody acquiring CentOS or somebody doing stuff with CentOS is —

Dave Rosenberg: Somebody makes CentOS a business, how is that?

Matt Ray: Because they could call it unbreakable.

John Willis: I would like to do that myself.

Michael Coté I think in our second year of wacky predictions, we have come to a good sort of like — I am not suggesting we necessarily ended now, but I think we have come to a good sort of like rush thing at the end where it’s like the acquisition minute run down, and everything just like blast out, who they think is going to acquire who, and like in the last minute, I think we will have to use that format on going, just as an editorial note over there.

Dave Rosenberg: Whatever works, man?
Michael Coté: How about like Google finally like buys some big company?

Dave Rosenberg: They are not good at it.

Matt Ray: Dell!

Dave Rosenberg: It would be awesome. Let’s put that in there.

Michael Coté: Oh, I am typing that right now.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah. There are no two really more opposite companies than that.

Michael Coté: Oh, yes. That’s a —

Matt Ray: That would be like some picture of some fish trying to eat another fish that’s even that same fish. by Cisco who is buying Dell at the same.

Michael Coté: It sounds like you guys are hot on like acquisitions being a big thing next year.

Dave Rosenberg: It’s an interesting time, because if you start a company right now, everything that you are looking at is pretty — it’s a much longer horizon than it was, I think, in terms of monetization. So you have to be looking out like two years, if you start a company. And so, all the companies that started in like, say, 2006 are kind of getting to the point next year, where they have been around for a while, and they either have to be meaningful or will get acquired. And there is a lot of companies that got started in that timeframe.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Then it is like the crops — there are all sorts of metaphors that you can use, but the crop is ready to harvest, essentially, is what you are saying.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I think so. And as I said, it could be adoption like the Spring stuff or it could be fitting into a niche like, again — well a public stop for Chef or any of those other things, where it solves a very specific problem that all of these big vendors have. I don’t know, it seems that the horizon is right. And if I am a big vendor, what the hell do I do to grow? And these guys are so goddamn big at this point, they have such enormous payrolls and responsibilities to shareholders; they have got to figure things out. That’s way it still seems like there are a lot of opportunities for Open Source companies to have big exits to me.

Michael Coté: So essentially circling back to the VC thing, the VC industry gets saved, essentially, is what happens.

Dave Rosenberg: No, I think it consolidates pretty dramatically itself. There is so much money though that nothing has to be forced. People like talk about VC model being screwed up, and it is, but they still have $200 or $300 or $400 millions in the bank. Like well, how long can you really go, if you know that you can run this business for 50 years? Investors expect returns over 10 years.

Michael Coté: It’s kind of like complaining that your private jet has five seats instead of ten.

Dave Rosenberg: Here is another one for you. I am going to predict that there is going to be a challenger to Intellectual Ventures.

Michael Coté: Well, why don’t you explain to people who Intellectual Ventures is?

Dave Rosenberg: Well, they are the firm started by Nathan Myhrvold who buy up patents and they fund a lot of the patent development, and basically, they pay people and vendors and such to build things, and they own the IP for it and they license it out. And a lot of people sort of make it out to be a great saving. I don’t really think it is. It’s a genius business model and somebody else is going to figure that out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see like IBM or somebody else come along and decide that they want to be a big patent house as well, and start really using it to enforce their own technology.

Michael Coté: Just sort of licensing things out as it were.

Matt Ray: Yeah.

Michael Coté Man! Every time I come across like people who do that it’s like a wrong business model.

John Willis:             gets acquired by Gartner.

Dave Rosenberg: How about an international assignment, like Michael Coté takes an international assignment, Australia?

Michael Coté: Oh, Australia! Come on.

Dave Rosenberg: How about that?

Matt Ray: That’s a hot bed of IT. Sorry, Australia.

Dave Rosenberg: You can be Telstra —

Michael Coté: This is more commentary on my American geographic ignorance than anything. But I used to think Australia would be great for like getting into this specific market and then I was talking with Australian people and apparently, it takes like 8- 10 years to get to Asia from Australia. And so it’s kind of like Jesus Christ! This is like you can’t get jack shit anywhere if you live in Australia, it takes forever.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, you are pretty screwed.

Michael Coté: Or New Zealand I guess.

Dave Rosenberg: They are all criminals.

Michael Coté: And my understanding is that New Zealand milk delivery market is ripe for innovation.

Matt Ray: DHL moving in.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I was going to say. It sounds like this acquisition stuff. Everybody but me is going to get rich in 2010. That sounds like the basic — that’s what I am taking away from these whacky productions.

Matt Ray: So, green shoots.

Dave Rosenberg: We should list — if you go to the Open Source companies, they are easiest ones to look at. Over the last couple of years, Alfresco, Matt even just blogged about it today, now sort of too big to be acquired at a number that’s meaningful for the founders. They are about 40 million in revenue and no real —

Michael Coté: Too successful for exit.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah. So how do you exit out of that? Hyperic is gone. So that means that you have got Zenoss and GroundWork or whatever in that space. You’ve got like what was that got acquired for no money. Spring is gone. I mean who else is even sort of meaningful at this point in terms of adoption or usage?

Of course, I can say this, but still the I’d love to see source software to be acquired and the revenue is up and adoption is big. And it seems logical, but who the hell knows. I am trying to think who else would we even talk about. Jaspersoft, business is doing well. Pentaho —

John Willis: (Voice Overlap).

Dave Rosenberg: I mean they started a company finally in the UK there.

John Willis: Yeah.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I don’t know who pays for that. I mean this is the ongoing challenge of being an entrepreneur, same thing with so many other technologies.

Matt Ray: Isn’t RabbitMQ Apache? Maybe that’s the problem.

Dave Rosenberg: No, there is an Apache project but Rabbit is the Java implementation of it.

Matt Ray: Oh, okay.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah. AMQP is the Apache project. I don’t know. I still think we’re going to see, there is lot of stuff like — the other thing like these companies like webappVM and all these other like nichy sort of interesting virtualization companies, they don’t really — I couldn’t even really tell you what they do. They do like one thing that sort of cool, but somebody is going to want to own it.

If I am Microsoft and I am dealing with all that hyper table, hyper browser, whatever the —

John Willis: I think in that space, next year we’ll see a bloodbath players that private cloud based on the Amazonish model.

Michael Coté: Yeah, alright.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I think that they’re — and they’ll be out of business for 2011, that will be our big prediction next year.

John Willis: Yeah, yeah. Now I agree .

Dave Rosenberg: Well, I’ll give you two more predicted trends for Cloud because I got to jump off shortly here and go box, which is — that’s what I’ll do, I’ll have my first pro-fight in 2010. That will be my – now, I forgot what they were. I got the strike of things that are getting hit in the head.

Michael Coté: Speaking of your boxing. maybe the — I forgot what I was going to say.

Dave Rosenberg: That will be at OSBC next year, there will be a fistfight.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah? The Open Source world gets brutal.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, the Open Source battle, it will be like UFC. It’s a great idea. I’m going to go and sell that to Matt and rest of the.

Michael Coté: And then it turns out that much like the grappler in the UFC stuff that license just takes down every one.

Dave Rosenberg: Really, the —

Michael Coté: The only style that can eliminate — it eliminates not really by being stylistic or pretty to look at, but it’s just undefeatable. It’s like trying to argue with a brick.

Matt Ray: It just gets beats up and keeps coming back.

Dave Rosenberg: My Cloud prediction, there are two big trends in funding, I think, we’ll see will be Cloud management and integration tools.

Michael Coté: So how about we wrap up the episode since Dave has to go beat up on people as if we haven’t been giving our good work out here already.

Dave Rosenberg: I have to tell you guys, I had my first — I put a guy down in a TKO about two weeks ago.

Michael Coté: Oh wow! There is a little TKO like letters coming out of his head like in that old game.

Dave Rosenberg: No, but the trainer had to hold him from going down. I got to tell you, it’s so pretty goddamn good.

Matt Ray: And I was trying to pick fights at OSBC.

Dave Rosenberg: I was to use my words instead of my.

Michael Coté: Yeah, especially if your words are tattooed on your fist. So how about we close — so Matt Ray, do you have any predictions you want to close out with.

Matt Ray: I am not going to hire anybody with tattoos on their fists.

Dave Rosenberg: I predict I will get to my 1000 blog posts on CNET, sometime early next year in Q1.

Michael Coté: Alright, and yourself, John Willis, any last predictions?

John Willis: I predict that the IT Management Wacky Predictions gets a sponsor and we can all do this next year here in Austin.

Michael Coté: A video edition. I should think about that.

Dave Rosenberg: It’s when Google buys Dell, they are going to fly it out.

John Willis: That’s right. (Voice Overlap) One really, wacky, wacky stuff through is that we’ll get sponsors.

Michael Coté: Well, that sounds great. Well, I don’t have any more wacky predictions or snide comments. So we better just wrap it up with that. So thanks everyone for joining us this year for the Wacky Predictions. That’s a fun stuff.

John Willis: Awesome!

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