One year ago, I made a bunch of predictions. Today I call myself out and see how I did. Tomorrow (or maybe a little later in the week) I'll post some predictions for 2005. That will pretty much round out my posts for 2004 - during the holidays I'm focusing on writing the book. But I couldn't resist this little exercise first. So...How did I do? Not bad, all told. Possibly because my predictions were facile, but still, we all have our own bars, don't we? I managed to limbo under mine pretty well. So, to the specifics. My first prediction: "The Web becomes a platform (again)." I think with the buzz around desktop search and the Google OS, the strong performance of the major platform players like Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo, the happy and well attended buzz around Web 2.0, this seems to be coming to fruition. My second: "Blog ecologies of like-minded folks will garner increasing cultural and social power." With the rise of political bloggers, the rising communities of Scoble, Zawodny, and others, and Time Magazine even considering naming "bloggers" as their person of the year, I'd say this one was pretty much dead on. Third prediction: "The Dutch auction/OpenIPO model will be validated." Check. Fourth: "We'll see a major IPO ($100 million+ sold to public) in search that isn't Google." Well, I sort of got this one, and sort of did not. We had Tom Online in March, and Navteq in October. Whether Navteq is search related is debatable, but certainly search drove its valuation. The company raised $880 million. We also had Marchex, but it didn't make my $100 million in proceeds limit (though it did very well...). Perhaps I could argue that Shopping.com, which raised $137 million, is search related (they sure would...
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A Look Back
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