Prog-NOT-stications for 2012

I had so my fun with my predictions for net year that I thought I’d keep the party going with a list of five things that won’t happen in 2012.

The First Facebook Election

You just know that these thumb-suckers are already being written. Facebook + Election = boatload of navel-gazing by the Grey Lady about the diminished role of traditional media in elections as a result of the rise of Facebook and Twitter. But I predict the reality will show that this election will really be about the return of retail politics, including the resurgence of the convention, complete with smoke-filled rooms.

Victory of the Cloud Crybabies

Repeat after me: all It systems have unplanned downtime.  But a staple of coverage of the occasional outage, particularly in the European press has been to use the events as occasions to question whether cloud services are ready for prime time. As these services become more widely adopted, the winging will continue to abate.

The Enterprisation of the Consumer

Complexity, upgrade management, device incompatibility-- consumers just aren’t going (back) there. Choice has been dethroned by Apple in favor of Elegance and Ease-of- Use. The big question for 2012 is whether Familiarity and its henchman, Distribution will lure the masses to Windows Phone. I just don’t see it, despite surveys that show that people are looking for an alternative from Microsoft.

Tim Cook, CEO of the Year

This is more a comment about press coverage cycles than Cook’s abilities, which by all accounts, seem considerable. After the lionization of Jobs at his passing, the media will be, at best, looking for signs that Jobs continues to influence Apple, and at worst, suggesting that the company has lost its swagger faster than an iPhone loses battery strength.

Redmond Resurgent

This is how it will go down.  I don’t think there will be a revival in Microsoft’s fortunes, but the press will succumb to the urge to call the turnaround. The cover of, say, Bloomberg BusinessWeek will be unflattering picture of Bill Gates’ former college roommate, and the headline will be something like “Ballmer Embattled: The Inside Story of His Plan to Save Microsoft--and His Job”. It will be studded with moments that hint at candor, but smell more like Teen Spirit. Here goes (and I swear the snark here is directed at the formulaic press, not meant as a personal dig at Ballmer)

“To hear Ballmer describe it, Microsoft, once a behemoth to be feared, and yes, sometimes loathed, has become the Rodney Dangerfield of software: It Can’t Get No Respect. His impatience with what he calls “a jihad by the Apple-polishing press” boils over when Windows Phone is mentioned: “I mean what the (expletive deleted) do we have to do here? We have won every review, every sided-by-side comparison,” he says, a vein bulging on his reddening forehead, his hammy fists pounding the conference table so hard that his PR rep’s Blackberry (!) jumps on the conference table. “But all we get is ‘nice, but no cigar, and certainly not an iPhone killer.’ Like that’s that we do here, get out of bed in the morning, and say ‘Let’s kill us some products.’ Please.”

The coup de gras will come from a nice-guy former CEO of a company Microsoft purchase a few years ago: “There’s no harder job in this industry right now that making that company a success.”

I got $50 that says we see the Ballmer article by the end of June. As a journalism school professor once told me: “the story is writing itself”. Who’s in?

Happy New Year. Here’s hoping that your headlines in 2012 are all good ones.