Predicting the future can be difficult
Regular commentator Bill Thompson looks forward to cheap net access and cloud computing.
If you're ever asked to forecast the way computing will develop, offer to look three to five years ahead.
It's a good, safe time frame because if you're right then people may just remember your prediction when you remind them how clever you are, and if you're wrong it's very unlikely anyone will think to point it out.
Trying to anticipate significant developments for the coming year is a lot harder, perhaps because the tendency is to overestimate the impact of the few obvious trends and miss the slow-burn developments that are on the verge of going mainstream and changing the way we see the world.
For example, last year I wrote "we are building our lives around the network and the things it makes possible, and 2006 marks the year in which this became a sensible and indeed rather normal thing to do rather than something that marked you out as a geek".
While it's true that Facebook and other social network sites went mainstream, they are still not as widespread as the sometimes breathless coverage would make you think.
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