Brian Willis

Predictions for 2017

A short one this year, as we live in uncertain times.

Once again, despite my repeated insistence, one of you went and launched another social service. I warned you all not to do this, but I suppose it was inevitable that eventually someone would try and open source Twitter. We’ve had paid twitter, charity twitter, and gnu twitter, so this really is the next logical step. This one is doomed to failure for the same reason as all the others—social services aren’t about features, they’re about people, and the people are all using Twitter.

I’m calling it now: the digital crown is coming to the iPhone. It’s such a natural interaction on the Apple Watch, would fit perfectly with where you already place your fingers, and could replace the volume up/down buttons in an obvious way.

In other news: Yahoo goes out of business; Google’s next Pixel phone becomes a meaningful threat to the iPhone; Apple demonstrates that they still care about the Mac by releasing exemplary Kaby Lake desktops; Microsoft flails in all directions, doing a better job of pleasing developers than paying customers; and you still won’t be able to edit a Tweet.

It’s traditional for me to wrap this up by predicting that Half Life 3 will come out this year. While I may have started this post calling these “uncertain times”, now that we’re ten years following the previous chapter’s release I think we can say with certainty that the Half Life franchise is well and truly dead.