Published on the 07/12/2016 | Written by Anthony Caruana

December – the time for putting up the Christmas tree, counting down the days till holidays and trying to be nice to your work colleagues at the office party…

And it’s also when every tech company on the planet takes the time to write their predictions for the next year.

In my 15 years or so writing about technology, I’ve never read a single prediction that wasn’t simply a linear extrapolation of something that was already happening.

I’m not going to pick on any specific vendor here; like the warning at the end of every movie or TV show, any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental. But here are the five most common predictions I’ve seen for next year.

1 – The cloud will continue to grow in popularity

That’s like saying the All Blacks will win their next match. Of course it will grow. It’s a useless prediction, like saying water will continue to be wet.

I looked back through some press releases and my own archives. Other than Larry Ellison saying some stuff that almost everyone dismissed as the ravings of a nutcase in the early 2000’s, no one really predicted the rise of the “as a Service” economy.

2 – Ransomware will be big business

It already is, there’s nothing to see here.

But, I will add one thing. IBRS analyst James Turner recently penned a paper saying if you decide to pay a ransom if you’re attacked, you are making a decision to fund terrorism. That’s not a prediction but it’s an important insight.

I was going to add a couple more infosec-related items to the list but you can substitute DDoS or almost any other current threat vector to this prediction and make your own top ten security predictions list.

3 – Machine learning and AI will become increasingly important

This prediction can be filed under Captain Obvious. We’ve seen machine learning and AI techniques permeate our systems for the last few years. I suspect the real news here is that the marketing types realised automation and orchestration were never going to make for sexy headlines.

But machine learning and AI let you use cool pictures from sci-fi to illustrate your brochures.

4 – The wearable tech bubble will burst

If you’ve worked in the tech industry for more than a decade you’ll have seen this headline before: “The <insert new tech here> bubble will burst.”

All new technology goes through a lifecycle. There’s a period of early enthusiasm followed by market disillusionment when products fail to live up to early hype. Then the developers fix the problems found by early adopters before there’s widespread adoption.

Wearable tech is here to stay. The early challenges like crappy software and poor battery life are solvable. These are engineering issues and with enough time, money and effort engineering problems are always solved.

The prognosticators are mistaking the failure and challenges of some vendors, such as Fitbit’s purchase of Pebble and Moto’s decision to get out of the smartwatch business, as the market collapsing. The bubble isn’t bursting – it’s a normal market behaviour where early developers are overtaken by the second wave.

5 – The IoT will be a big deal for <insert your own area of importance>

Security, network design, infrastructure management, user experience… the Internet of Things is probably the lead contender for the “Most used buzzword in any context” award for 2016.

It’s true that IoT has been big news in 2016. But predicting it will be a big deal in 2017 is like predicting January 2017 will follow December 2016.

It’s not like all of 2016’s technology is erased and we start over in 2017. Of course IoT will be a big deal next month – it’s a big deal this month.