
What is going to happen in 2015 - kernelv
http://avc.com/2015/01/what-is-going-to-happen/
======
jorgecastillo
I more or less agree with everything except this points:

>2/ Xiaomi will spend some of the $1.1bn they just raised coming to the US.
This will bring a strong player in the non-google android sector into the US
market and legitimize a “third mobile OS” in the western world. The good news
for developers is developing for non-google android is not much different than
developing for google android.

The "third mobile OS" is Windows Phone and even if something else takes this
spot, it's still not that great to be third.

>3/ More asian penetration into the US market will come from the messenger
sector as both Line and WeChat make strong moves to gain a share of the
lucrative US messenger market.

I doubt those companies will be more than marginal players in the us market
next year, maybe later?

>11/ ... patients treating patients (p2p medicine) ...

This seems kind of insane!

I didn't understand the following very well, if someone can explain or point
me elsewhere, I'd really appreciate it:

>8/ The horrible year that bitcoin had in 2014 will be a wakeup call for all
stakeholders. Developers will turn their energy from creating the next bitcoin
(all the alt stuff) to creating the stack on top of the bitcoin blockchain.
Real decentralized applications will start to emerge as the platform matures
and entrepreneurial energy is channeled in the right direction.

I don't see the point of bitcoin or any other virtual currency? To me nothing
beats legal tender currencies.

~~~
zanny
> To me nothing beats legal tender currencies.

Go run a tip system on reddit using fiat currency.

Go try sending money to someone in Ethiopia in fiat currency.

Ensure nobody can steal your money without you making a mistake first (either
giving someone else access, or leaving your wallet password in the open).

Transfer a large sum of money (in excess of, say, 100k) in seconds between an
arbitrary sender and receiver.

~~~
sanswork
>Go run a tip system on reddit using fiat currency.

changetip is off chain so it doesn't matter what currency you use it would
work the exact same. There are other micropayment and tipping systems that
don't use bitcoin and they are just about as successful as changetip(not
very).

>Go try sending money to someone in Ethiopia in fiat currency.

Try sending money to someone in Ethiopia using bitcoin in a way they allows
them to actually use it in Ethiopia.

>Ensure nobody can steal your money without you making a mistake first (either
giving someone else access, or leaving your wallet password in the open).

Ensure that if you do make a simple mistake(how many relatives do you know
that have installed toolbars? Thats the level of simple mistake you have to
avoid) you will lose all your money with no recourse.

>Transfer a large sum of money (in excess of, say, 100k) in seconds between an
arbitrary sender and receiver.

Large wire transfers are simple and given the cost and difficulty of acquiring
100k worth of bitcoin would almost certainly be cheaper and faster.

~~~
jaimeyap
> Large wire transfers are simple and given the cost and difficulty of
> acquiring 100k worth of bitcoin would almost certainly be cheaper and
> faster.

I would add to that safer too. Something goes wrong you can call the banks and
they can roll things back. There is a paper trail that works in your favor.

------
7Figures2Commas
> Capital markets will be a mixed bag in 2015. Big tech names will continue to
> access capital easily (see 1/), but the combination of rising rates and
> depressed prices for oil will bring great stress to global capital markets
> and there will be a noticeable flight to safety around the world. Safety
> used to mean gold, US treasuries, and blue chip stocks. Now it means Google,
> Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.

So several of the biggest momo plays of an extended bull market are now safety
stocks?

Notwithstanding the fact that anyone who has even a modicum of knowledge of
the public equities markets will cringe at the notion that GOOG, FB, et. al.
are the new Treasuries (they're not), it's worth pointing out that Google's
shares were basically flat last year and Amazon's shares lost more than 20% in
2014 as investors started to question the company's strategy in light of the
fact that some of its big investments clearly aren't working. That Wilson
lumped these two names in with FB and AAPL, which had excellent years, tells
you how informed this prediction is.

~~~
dualogy
> Safety used to mean gold, US treasuries, and blue chip stocks. Now it means
> Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.

Hahaha, OK folks Wilson just called the top of the bubble right here.

------
api
The "death of the file" is a really mixed bag. The replacement is walled
gardens with no privacy, control and perhaps even ownership of your data,
questionable security, and the potential that your data could vanish if one is
acquires or goes under.

~~~
gaius
I have a friend who had a Kodak camera that, you plugged it into your PC and
it uploaded straight to Kodak's photo hosting (this was before we called such
things "cloud storage"). If you wanted your own copies of your own photos you
would need to go onto said site and right-click download them one at a time.

One day Kodak decided they weren't going to run this site anymore, and just
deleted the whole lot. She was heartbroken. And I look at all these guys
selling similar solutions, and I got to wonder at what point did they
knowingly cross the line to exploiting and victimising ordinary users?

~~~
api
There's a whole raft of home automation devices, printers, etc. that will
become bricks if certain cloud servers are turned off.

Personally I think this fad will crash and burn, but it will take many rounds
of consumer disappointment and flagrant disregard like you describe.
Eventually "you control it" will become a selling point.

~~~
ghaff
For the most part, home automation is a horrible mess right now with
incompatible proprietary systems that mostly don't even solve any particular
problem.

That said, there's a definite tradeoff between having devices that just work
and maintaining control over all the information storage and information
flows. In the case of the parent comment, automatically backing up photos is
actually a great feature for a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't back them
up at all. But it's not so good when the service shuts down or your account
gets hacked (as in the celebrity photos this past year).

~~~
scholia
There's a difference between doing it out of self-interest (Kodak, Apple) and
providing a user service. It would be perfectly possible to provide automatic
backups of photos via the user's choice of cloud (Dropbox, OneDrive etc) with
the cloud service copying them to the user's chosen personal storage (PC, NAS,
whatever).

That would work except for the people who don't and/or won't have any personal
storage. However, if people won't look after their own data, I'm unlikely to
be too sad when they lose it.

~~~
ghaff
>However, if people won't look after their own data, I'm unlikely to be too
sad when they lose it.

I'm going to disagree with you on that. This piece that John Gruber wrote
after the celebrity iCloud account hack is spot on IMO:
[http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/security_tradeoffs](http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/security_tradeoffs)

"Over the years I’ve received numerous emails from past and former Genius Bar
support staff, telling similar stories of heartbreak. Customer comes in, their
iPhone completely broken, or lost, or stolen, and they had precious photos and
videos on it. The birth of a child. The last vacation they ever took with a
beloved spouse who has since passed away. Did they ever back up their iPhone
to a Mac or PC with iTunes? No. In many cases they don’t even know what
“iTunes on a PC” even means. Or maybe they connected the iPhone to iTunes
once, the day they bought it and needed to activate it, and then never again."

For many people it honestly is a choice between an automated cloud service and
going without a safety net at all.

Do I personally depend on a cloud provider when I can avoid it? I try not to
with anything I really care about. I use cloud providers but have plenty of my
own backup systems as well. But I'm not the typical consumer.

~~~
gaius
I like a deal where you pay a fee and get a service. The "free" stuff can
vanish on a whim.

~~~
ghaff
While paying for a service gives one more confidence and, if it's a large
company, I'd be surprised if they just shut things down overnight, you don't
really have meaningful recourse if they just go belly up or just make a really
bad IT mistake. Ideally, use multiple storage locations--private and hosted.

With respect to the parent comment about Kodak, they actually transferred
things to Shutterfly and photos supposedly did not just go away:
[http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/05/business/la-fi-
tech-...](http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/05/business/la-fi-tech-savvy-
shutterfly-20120705) This also wasn't really a "free" service as it was
supposedly a feature you got with the camera.

------
julianpye
Why Xiaomi uses its own Android flavour for the Chinese market is clear. But I
don't believe they will push their own Android flavour to the US and EU
markets, but rather use Playstore-enabled versions. Their first goal is to
compete against Samsung in handset price. And Samsung has shown that it is
very hard for an Asian manufacturer to introduce their own OS flavours and
apps into a Western market.

~~~
unsigner
They can't make Playstore-enabled versions; Google doesn't allow you to make
both Google- and non-Google Android devices. It's either all Google or no
Google.

~~~
arihant
Their international versions outside China come with Play store. In fact,
there is no way to get their own store outside China.

------
rjurney
Having tried an Oculus Rift generation 3, where the tracking is PERFECT and
the resolution is adequate, I think VR will do better in 2015 than he
suggests.

~~~
Morphling
At first Oculus seemed like a cool idea, but you can really only play
"simulator" games with it, games where you sit in a vehicle otherwise it ruins
the VR feel and you might as well just play on a monitor.

Only other thing I've seen was some sort of sculpting thing, but I'd imagine
the novelty would wear out there pretty fast.

More I think about whole VR thing the less I think it will actually be a
thing. I'm sure when Oculus Rift comes out for reals a lot of people are going
to buy them, but I don't really see a lot of value for developers supporting
them in most games, but someone comes up with killer app/game for it.

~~~
gumby
> At first Oculus seemed like a cool idea, but you can really only play
> "simulator" games with it, games where you sit in a vehicle otherwise it
> ruins the VR feel and you might as well just play on a monitor.

Check out castAR which you might consider an "inside out" VR experience that
projects the virtual world into the real world. Thus you can walk around and
look at 3D objects from all sides, see other players, your coffee, or whatever
is in the real world, instead of the VR approach of sitting in one place
looking around. So it's a way of working you _can 't_ do with a monitor.

(CastAR can run regular VR apps too with a small adaptor, but that feels less
compelling than the mixed/augmented reality)

[http://www.technicalillusions.com/](http://www.technicalillusions.com/)

(note: We're hiring in Mountain View!)

------
zevyoura
> 3/ More asian penetration into the US market will come from the messenger
> sector as both Line and WeChat make strong moves to gain a share of the
> lucrative US messenger market

I get that it's very hot right now, but is the US messenger market actually
lucrative? Who is making significant money from it? My understanding is the
leader in the sector as far as revenue goes is WhatsApp, which last I heard
was on track for ~30M in 2014[0]; doesn't seem like enough of an incentive for
a bunch of Chinese players to enter the market aggressively.

[0] [http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/whatsapp-
revenue/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/whatsapp-revenue/)

~~~
sanxiyn
Line's revenue in 2014 was ~600M, which is 20x higher than WhatsApp.

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/29/chat-app-lines-revenue-
doub...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/29/chat-app-lines-revenue-doubles-year-
on-year-to-reach-192-million-in-q3-2014/)

------
arihant
Xiaomi's MIUI is not much different from other OEMs offering their own layer
of UI over Android. It is in no way a third OS. I doubt here if Fred ever used
a Xiaomi phone. If not, it is weird at best that a comment about it's future
is second on his list.

Moreover, Xiaomi's international versions come with Google Play services and
all Google apps installed, just like any other phone. You do not get Xiaomi's
app store (similar to Kindle store) in international versions. You get Google
Play store.

It is really just another Android phone, from an OS standpoint. They have
fixed a lot of things bad with Android, like permissions control and
integratedness. But that doesn't mean that it is a different OS.

------
lifeisstillgood
The oculus rift purchase was listed as a major factor in football predicted
revenues in the next few years in an impressive book I read over Xmas

I was knocked sideways by a book this Xmas - "The secret footballers guide to
the modern game". It's a really good read especially for those of us who
thought / think brains and insight vanish at the boundary of real life and
sports. It's written by a top class footballer with current links to top
flight commercial and sporting people.

And he mentions Facebooks acquisition of Oculous Rift. It's part of how the
current commercials are tipping in favour of clubs and how leagues will stop
dancing to the needs of TV schedules

Expect one club in 2015 to do a Louis CK - put out a self published "view from
the pitch" via oculus rift and make more money directly than they would from
traditional TV rights. Then everyone else will follow once contracts expire.

------
bendyBus
8/ A new generation of apps redefining work habits is well overdue. The
obvious driver I see is that people's expectations for software
usability/design are set by consumer apps. Also millenials are entering the
workforce, and they have never had to take a course to learn how to use a
piece of software. Any tool which requires training is arcane in their eyes,
and probably rightly so. Add zero downtime, access-and-share from any device,
auto sync & backup, beautiful UI to the list of requirements. Some of these
are being addressed by office 365 and the like, but unbundled web-based
productivity software looks ripe to dethrone mircosoft as THE enterprise
productivity software vendor.

------
dguido
> 10/ cybersecurity budgets will explode in 2015 as every company,
> institution, and government attempts to avoid being Sony’d. VCs will pour
> money into this sector in the same way they poured money into the rental
> economy. and, yet, the hacks will continue because on the open internet
> there is no such thing as an impenetrable system.

This seems misinformed. You don't need perfect security to avoid getting
hacked. And perfect security is, actually, an attainable goal if you care to
work towards it and take heed of current research (see, for example:
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/ironclad/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/ironclad/)).

Is Fred trying to say that all the money spent on security will be wasted? I
could agree with that. IMHO security is a classic case of a lemon market where
buyers are unable to determine the security properties/utility of wares before
purchase. Buyer sophistication is low and nearly all are beholden to marketing
(the same is largely true of VCs choosing investments!).

Or maybe Fred is saying that it will take years for security investments to
pay off. I agree with this too. "It can't/won't happen to us" is still a
pervasive attitude, even in 2014, and it generally takes a major incident at
each and every company to 1) wake them up and 2) inform them about what works
and what is snake oil 3) drive adoption of new tech. (related problem:
convincing management to divest themselves of old, broken tech that never
worked in the first place to free up budgets.)

People talk about the talent gap in security a lot, so we try to train more
experts in this field. But the same gap is present elsewhere: I have yet to
see many VCs with a sophisticated understanding of security. I'm not sure
where they could learn if they wanted to. If I had to predict something, it's
that new-money security experts from companies with acquisitions/IPOs in 2014
start funding security tech that actually works. In the meantime, DARPA
continues to lead:
[http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/](http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/)

~~~
tptacek
He's not saying it's a market for lemons, though it is. He's saying that even
when big companies select the best vendors, the end results aren't
meaningfully different.

For a Fortune 500 enterprise, retaining the very best firms in the world and
selecting the very most secure products does not foreclose on Sony-style
outcomes. To accomplish that, enterprises need to rewire their entire internal
IT processes to orient themselves towards security. Nobody does that, for the
same reason that most modern software isn't built with processes
(immutability, strong typing, pattern matching) that foreclose on bugs.

There's a benefit to selecting security expertise carefully. But that benefit
isn't "insurance against the Sony outcome".

I'm unaware of a VC that's intelligent about security, but the expectation
that they would have any security domain expertise misconstrues the job of a
VC; it's a little bit like thinking that an energy options trader would have a
significant understanding of mechanical engineering principles. It's much more
important that they know how to evaluate addressable market size, go-to-market
plans, and sales management.

~~~
marcusgarvey
>I'm unaware of a VC that's intelligent about security

See Ted Schlein of KPCB.

------
richardwhiuk
Xiaomi will spend some of the $1.1bn they just raised coming to the US

I doubt that. Most of the $1.1bn would be spent defending against IP lawsuits
that operating the US would make them vulnerable to. Xiaomi's phones look like
a better rip off of Apple than Samsung was able/willing to do, and Apple will
sue them if they enter a market with good IP protection.

------
datashovel
My prediction for 2015. Something related to machine learning / AI will hit
the consumer market that will truly amaze, and feel like it's ahead of its
time. I don't know what this "something" will be, but it will be obvious when
it happens.

~~~
datashovel
And if not 2015, I think we're certainly only a few years away from some
groundbreaking stuff in that space.

------
zxcvcxz
I hope the US de-schedules weed.

~~~
waterside81
The Feds won't have to - if each state continues to make it legal/regulated,
it's the same effect as descheduling it. It's kind of ingenious, actually, on
the part of the Federal government.

~~~
Alex3917
There is still a lot of stuff that depends on weed being legal at the federal
level, beyond just the consumer not getting arrested for buying small amounts.
We're never going to see serious investment in the space until sellers can
access bank infrastructure, there is no longer a risk of DEA raids, state laws
are aligned with federal laws, etc.

It's not going to happen in 2015 though, unless it gets tacked onto some other
crazy spending bill, which is unlikely. It'll probably happen sometime between
2016 and 2024.

~~~
sophacles
Question for the historically minded folks here - Has there ever been a
situation where a bunch of states decided that making something legal (or
conversely illegal) against the federal government's position, cause a change
in federal policy? How did that work? Can lessons from that apply now to the
marijuana debate, amongst others, in the US?

~~~
ghaff
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law)

When the US passed the 55 mph speed limit, it was generally ignored by
motorists and wasn't really enforced by a lot of states--and it was eventually
repealed. Key difference though is that the feds never had enforcement
authority unlike the case with the DEA.

------
AndrewKemendo
_After a big year in 2014 with the Facebook acquisition of Oculus Rift,
virtual reality will hit some headwinds._

Agree, but I think that Augmented Reality will really breakout in 2015. VR and
AR are complements, and the press from Oculus and VR over the last year really
helps people understand AR. Because of the potential practical applications, I
think AR will become more widely adopted and help to spread AR/VR adoption.

------
chubot
+1 for 2015 being a tough period after the hype for VR and wearables. They
will both be a thing, but people always overestimate progress in the short run
and underestimate it in the long run.

+1 for cybersecurity budgets exploding. How would one make a financial bet on
this fact? It doesn't seem doable through a "normal" brokerage firm; it seems
you need to be a VC or early investor.

~~~
larrykubin
If you want to invest in some larger publicly traded companies, there is a new
cybersecurity ETF, ticker symbol HACK. You could buy some shares of the ETF or
shares of some of the individual holdings. A list of holdings can be found
here:

[http://www.pureetfs.com/etfs/hack.html](http://www.pureetfs.com/etfs/hack.html)

~~~
chubot
Hm it sounds interesting. But I'm wondering if the managers of this fund have
actual computer security knowledge, or are "general investor" types:

[http://www.pureetfs.com/about.html](http://www.pureetfs.com/about.html)

Partnering with "world class industry experts" is a bit too vague for me. It
sounds like they are spread across many verticals, so it's hard to judge their
expertise in a particular vertical.

I think most current security solutions aren't very good. There's a really big
problem with information asymmetry, in that the customers of security products
have less knowledge than the vendors.

If that's true, then I imagine that most of the value created in the security
space in the next 10 years will be from new companies.

Would you buy this fund yourself? Just trying to be a bit critical :) Thanks
for the information.

~~~
justincormack
The don't need expertise it is just an index fund, like the majority of ETFs,
it is based on the ISE Cyber Security Index
[http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20141111006259/en/ISE-...](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20141111006259/en/ISE-
ETF-Ventures-Launches-ISE-Cyber-Security%E2%84%A2) and has a bit of Juniper
and a bit of Splunk and other publicly listed "security" companies.

------
jacobsimon
God I hope people don't start using "n/" and other silly twitterisms in their
normal writing.

~~~
Jonovono
Why? How does that upset you more than people using n.?

------
on_and_off
I hope that he is right on point 7. I plan to emigrate to the USA and the H1-B
route is just insane. I am a skilled engineer in a field where there is a lot
of demand, it should be extremely easy for me to move there.

------
wslh
I would add Microsoft will leverage their position in the open source / cloud
space with .NET for Linux.

Reddit use and value will increase.

------
andyl
Fred predicts Chinese companies will make a big entrance to the US market in
2015. At the same time, China restricts US companies in their markets (Gmail
blocking being the latest example)

Why do we (in America) allow this asymmetry? Is it a mistake to give Chinese
companies an open door?

~~~
npalli
General Motors makes 58% of its entire profit in the Chinese Car market. Ford
makes 18% of its profit from China. So clearly, US gains by trade in cars.
This is clearly one example. The broader point is that a whole lot of US
companies make money in China.

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/detroits-road-through-china-
narr...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/detroits-road-through-china-narrows-
ahead-heard-on-the-street-1419922609)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
But don't that have to split those with their JVs, or is that their actual non
divided take? (Forgive me, WSJ is blocked by the GFW)

The US has a decent case against China if they want to go to the WTO, but I
guess they've decided for now at least, it's not worth it.

~~~
tacticus
Wouldn't the US need to at least follow WTO findings if they wanted to use the
WTO for that or risk China just ignoring it.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Sure, but I don't think the case is weak. Much of China's internet blocking is
blatantly economic, and whats more: China refuses to officially acknowledge
that it blocks these websites at all, it just does.

However, like everyone says, US companies make money in China, while the US
wants to maintain a strong relationship, while WTO action would probably just
devolve into another pointless tit for tat, so why bother going there?

