SYS-CON West Coast Bureau Chief Roger Strukhoff was recently reading the fearless predictions of many prognosticators as to what will be the big issues for 2006 in the technology industry. Fearful of being left out of the parade, he went out on no limbs to make a few predictions of his own. From his blog, he wrote:

It is time for all of punditry to clear its collective throat and pronounce precisely what will happen in the upcoming year. As I child I, somewhere back in the 20th century, learned to make fun of astrologist Jean Dixon's puerile prognostications, even as they dominated the newspaper headlines for a day or so at the end of every year.

Yet in our too-modern age, pontifical prognostication is a ubiquitous aspect of the torrent of bits that come flying into our PCs, digital TV signals, and digitally designed newspapers and magazines. It seems as if one is not being serious enough if he or she does not issue his or her annual list of The Big Stories of next year.

In this spirit, SYS-CON recently published a story that featured the fearless (if sometimes feckless) forecasts from a number of leading industry figures and, well, geeks. The general tone of these seemed to indicate a continued movement toward open-source, loose coupling, and web services.

These are safe bets, and are offered by people who are much more technically oriented than I. So I'll stay away from specific predictions regarding specific technologies, and offer the following observations:

1. The term globalization will continue through its initial Kantian thesis/antithesis stage in 2006, with two sides seemingly talking past one another. On one side are well-fed governmental trade representatives who believe that major WTO/World Bank/IMF/WEF/etc. meetings are platforms suited for ritual listings of their governments demands for Platonic level playing fields. On the other are young anarchists with nothing better (or creative) to do than break windows and attack iconic American symbols.

Some day, the current non-debate debate will evolve into a more serious consideration of what globalization really means. But first we have to get past the ritual Microsoft-hating by many people within the business community and ritual America-hating by many people period. This won't happen in 2006.