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Note: I wrote this article at the end of 2011, but I got busy with my RV trip across the western USA, Canada and Alaska and never published it.  Better late than never.  Though publishing this article now in 2013 invalidates the first sentence…

The best thing about making annual predictions is that by this time next year, nobody will remember how wrong we were.  So let’s boldly go where every other tech blogger has gone before, and peer into the future of the tech market in 2012.

1.  Microsoft will release Windows 8 and few will notice

There are 1.25 billion Windows users worldwide, including 500 million people on Windows 7.  And yet, most of the excitement and venture capital seems to be flowing to the mobile platforms of iOS and Android.  Ironically, one reason why nobody will notice Windows 8 is that Windows 7 is actually quite good and reliable.  And like Star Trek movies, every other version of Windows tends to be crap, so many companies will likely to skip the Windows 8 upgrade and wait for Windows 9.  But by then, will anyone be using a PC anymore?

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In Ray Kurzweil’s amazing 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Kurzweil predicts that computing power will continue along the exponential track of Moore’s Law, such that by the year 2030, a $1,000 personal computer will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain.  At that point, computers will be capable of learning and creating new knowledge entirely on their own with no human assistance.  By scanning the compendium of knowledge on the Internet, some computers will “know” literally every single piece of public information generated by human beings (every scientific discovery, every book and movie, every law and theorem).

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