To give my blog a theme of sorts, I said I’d have a bash at some predictions and see how I did. Well, here is the first review of my efforts:
In my post “Be brave and tell the truth” (9th August) I said that Frosted Lucky Charms had disappeared from the shelves. Not a prediction as such, but wrong nonetheless. I walked past a specialist food shop on Park Street in Bristol and was perturbed, to say the least, to see a box of the offending charms on the shelf – so I took a picture. It’s almost like somebody up there (higher than the top of Park Street even – and it’s a tall hill) is trying to tell me something.
In the same post I did say that Michael O’Leary just “tells-it-as-it-is” and that was the essence of his brand. That, again not a prediction, was correct and the little gobshite (as he refers to himself) has been in the news this week saying he’d like to scrap the role of co-pilot. I wonder what the real announcement was that day that he was trying to hide? Ryanair were probably introducing a surcharge for winter clothing and heavy jackets or something similar.
I have made some bona fide predictions since I started this blog and here they are:
In my post on 2nd August I predicted that there would be an increase in the number of w@nk words used in business in 2011 compared to 2010. It’s obviously too early to tell on that one, but someone did say “waterfall that to your team” in a meeting recently – I momentarily thought I’d moved into the pornography business and hadn’t kept abreast (pardon the pun) with the latest jargon.
The following day I predicted that the increase in the use of ‘apps’ to do things would kill the need for quicker computers and more complex software programmes, I suggested that we might even see the end of Moore’s Law. Now, this is long term thinking, the art of the futurologist is to talk about things that are too vague as to be challenged, so give this prediction time but both Intel and Microsoft have just had record quarters. I think we can mark that one as “must try harder”.
I was on a roll, at least I thought I was and so, intent on riding the wave of predictions, I made another the following day. I predicted that etailers would start competing on things such as service and not just price. Now, one swallow does not make a summer (I keep getting drawn back to the porn industry with my terminology, sorry about that), but I just ordered some furniture online (less than half price!) and received a call a few minutes later to confirm a delivery time. This etailer was following up on the price offer with a bit of value-add. Maybe they are a subscriber to this very blog and have faith in my predictions, then again maybe not, nonetheless it was an encouraging sign that I might be onto something.
The last prediction I made was that as technology improves, the special offers we receive will get worse. The reasoning was that the retailer will know what they have to offer to get your business. A bit like knowing the answer to a sealed bid auction, they are always going to offer as little as they need to and knowing the highest bid in the auction they can go one penny more than the competing bids and still win. Again, this is a long-term and hard to measure prediction (the art of the futurologist being heeded here), so try to prove that one right or wrong?
Having said that, my bank has gone against this grain (they bloody would too wouldn’t they) and announced that they are not charging me interest on my overdraft but will charge a flat £5 fee per month in place of this. How very kind and caring of them. It’s a good job that I don’t know my Bank Manager – as much as they’d like to suggest I do in their awful ads – if I did know him I would be giving him the evil eye and mumbling to myself because like most Brits I am rubbish at complaining.
Okay, so how’s my futurology then? On the face of it not that great, but remember I’m not Mystic Bloody Meg, I’m just predicting future trends. If I was able to predict the future I certainly wouldn’t be writing this right now, I’d be a right @Twatter and be telling you about the view from my Villa on the French Riviera on Twitter.
