Predictions for 2019 reviewed...

An annual tradition, writing a blog post about predictions for the next year. However how did this years predictions pan out. I am extremely happy!!!

Brexit? My prediction: Brexit will result in a political stalemate. The “solution” will be to play Russian roulette by asking a new people’s vote: hard or no Brexit?

Result: Great Get hard Brexit done or vote no Brexit...

China: China’s economy comes to a halt. After decades of enormous growth the bubble bursts and leaves behind a lot of bad Chinese debt. The US trade war is an accelerator. French yellow jackets will be dwarfed by their Chinese counterparts.

Result: becoming true Hong Kong and Xuar are clear symbols of the Chinese wonder starting to cracks.

Economy: Chinese debt triggers a global government and corporate debt crisis. Collaterised Loan Obligations or CLO will make news. Dejavú of a decade ago. 2019 will see the start but the real crisis years will be the next ones.

Result: A bit early.

FS Revolution: FS industry will face an innovation revolution as well. Challenger banks will provoke an exodus of clients for several trailing incumbents. This will result in large FinTech acquisitions and investments by incumbents but also high tech giants. 2019 will be the year the high tech giants enter into financial services in very visible ways. Digital multi-year plans will have to be rewritten half way through the year because innovation threatens digital. Customers will be the biggest winners. 2019 will be the year of open source financial services APIs, financial services meets distributed ledger, new concepts around multi-purpose mobile apps,...

Result: Great Monzo, Revolut and Starling are changing all strategies for large UK banks. RBS tried to acquire Monzo but couldn’t afford it and started its own. Others are following. Apple, Google and Amazon all started entering the FS market with credit cards and other payment options. Facebook’s Libra made global headlines. L&G deployed Estuare (pension blockchain to production). Open source APIS and multi-purpose mobile apps will have to wait till 2020.

Automoative: Incumbents will start to announce many electric vehicles but will find out that the real battle is driverless and offering transport as a service. Google, Tesla, GM, several startups and the Uber’s will all fight the driverless wars by launching commercial offerings. Google will be able to repeat their Android strategy and will announce major partnerships. Tesla will be the new Apple. Model 3 will beat sales records in the US, Europe and China. New Tesla factory in China opens before the end of the year. European Tesla factory to open in 2020. Tesla pickup, SUV and semi attract large volumes of preorders.

Result: Great many EV plans but large manufacturers are recognising that autonomous driving is the real battle. Tesla explained their robot tax strategy. Google launched fully autonomous taxis in Phoenix and Silicon Valley and announced partnerships with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Lyft, AutoNation, Avis, Intel, and Jaguar Land Rover. Tesla model 3 is best selling EV globally and Shanghai factory is operational. Berlin Tesla factory has been announced. Model Y predicted to be a big success. Cybertruck has 250,000 preorders.

Space: 2019 will start the space tourism race. SpaceX, Virgin, Blue Origin and several startups will be fighting the space battle to get media attention for new records. SpaceX will start to launch Starlink and with it will provoke a telecom revolution in the next 5 years.

Result: Great. All true. We need to wait another 4 years for Starlink disruption.

Other transportation: Train and underground transport will start trialing driverless in the UK. Electric buses will be mandated by many capitals in the world with time frames that “take the industry by surprise”. The Boring Company will provoke uproar for large scale underground architecture projects that are massively over budget, think London Crossrail.

Result: Not close. strikes are slowing down driverless deployments. China is global leader in electric buses. Climate change is making internal combustion engines look bad. The boring company announced interest from Las Vegas, CERN and Sydney.

Telecom: 2019 will not be a good year for telecom network providers and telecom operators. The 5G dream will turn into a nightmare. Real massive deployment costs will meet dreamt up revenues. Open source base stations will become the hype. App stores on base stations powered by software defined radios will become the future for new revenues. The new 5G strategy will be how to find ways for enterprises to buy their own base station. Starlink will come on the horizon and spoil the 5G rural party. Telecom operators will create a consortium to compete with Starlink in the next three years.

Result: Good. Huawei bans are making 5G deployments a lot harder. No mass adoption yet. Apple still waiting to bring a 5G iPhone to market. Vodafone’s Crowdcells and Facebook’s telecom infra project are getting interest. Starlink has become real.

Industrial: Fast 3D printing technologies will meet recycling. The plastic recycling problem will finally have some good news. Amazon will start offering industrial 3D printing as a service and will buy a startup that converts recycled plastic into printable plastic raw material.

Result: Not close. Too early but startups are making major improvements.

Health and chemical: Crispr-like techniques and DNA printing go mainstream. New medicines and chemical materials will make large headlines but the big winners are customers with dramatic acceleration of time to market.

Result: Great. Wired summarised it well: A New Crispr Technique Could Fix Almost All Genetic Diseases

High tech and IT: Blockchain is dead. Long live distributed ledger technology. Massive cross-industry attention for both Hyperledger and Corda will translate in distributed computing becoming the next big thing. Intermediaries will fight smart contracts trying to take away their business. The Java and Oracle database era comes to an end. Cloud databases and data warehouses will become the new normal. Python, Node.JS, DotNet and Golang will start to substitute Java in the enterprise. Serverless will start beating containers for which Kubernetes will start to abstract cloud services and the future is a hybrid model with databases, storage, serverless, monitoring, identity,... coming from cloud SaaS offerings living in conjunction with containers on Kubernetes. DevSecOps will be the new big thing each enterprise will start doing because the cyber threats are only getting bigger. Especially because several newly launched digital solutions by incumbants will see spectecular security hacks. 2019 will be the hype year for Quantum computing. Lots of talk, not too many action. That will have to wait 2 years. IoT will go through the Trough of Disillusionment. This means that the hype is over but real important projects will finally be built. AI offered via cloud services will reach a tipping point in which the new normal is to use AI in all new enterprise and digital offerings. If your slide deck does not mention AI you will not get budget. 2019 will see AI being combined with security and a new product category will come to life.

Result: Great. Bitcoin is over. Distributed ledger is coming but a bit early still. Cloud has gone mainstream. NodeJS and Python are becoming the new normal. Golang’s usage in Kubernetes, Docker,... are now accepted by enterprises. Lots are looking into containers but are finding out that serverless is actually easier. Amazon started offering Quantum in the cloud. Google and IBM are leading quantum hardware. IoT is no longer hyper but Alexa, Nest, Ring are sold in the many millions. Cloud AI is now the new normal. Lots of press about face recognition being used by governments and has become big business.