Some guaranteed predictions for 2012 – stuff you can take to the bank

It’s always nice when the end of one year comes about and the birth of a new year happens. It’s like there is a breath of fresh being breathed through the world, except that good feeling never seems to last all that long and we once again begin longing for a new year to come along.

Part of the whole process of saying good-bye to the old year and heralding in the new is this rather ridiculous habit of making predictions of what we think will happen in the new year. Most of the time they are nothing more than projections of things we wish to happen rather than trying to base them on things that have happened and will affect how things come to fruition in a new year.

No where is this silliness more apparent than in the tech industry as post after post on the last day of the year peers into some crystal ball and pontificate on the miraculous things that are going to happen in the tech world in the year to come. The majority of the time they don’t happen and the times when they do it is because they are so blantantly obvious that even a 2 year-old could have predicted them.

With that in mind I decided to have a bit of fun and come up with a list of predictions for the next year that you can be assured will happen, not that I would recommend buying stock based on them of course. So without further ado here we go.

1. Apple will release an updated and/or a new product – Duh!

2. Apple fanbois will continue to profess their love of the shiny apple and line up to buy anything that comes out. See No. 1

3. Microsoft will release some new operating system and will continue to be pummeled by anyone who lives in the tech bubble world.

4. Researchers will come out with study after study that says that Microsoft will fail as a company. See No. 3.

5. Android will continue pimping outrageous activation numbers as handset makers cut checks to Microsoft.

6. Tablets will be proclaimed as the desktop killer just as netbooks were.

7. Mobile will be proclaimed as the desktop killer and duke it out with tablets. See No. 6.

8. Mobile carriers will come out with new ways to further screw their customers and no-one will be surprised.

9. Piracy will be blamed for everything going wrong for the music and movie industry.

10. And finally – technology will continue to change our world in ways that we can’t even comprehend and we will continue to those innovations will kill everything that came before it.

There you go folks – 10 predictions for 2012 that you can be pretty sure will come about but if they don’t I claim no responsibility in their failure.