The first Triple Crown Winner in 45 years… and he bat .330
Welcome to another edition of an annual tradition, in which I go back and grade myself on my predictions made at the start of this year. My track record so far:
As was the case last year, I’m hoping to be wrong more often than not, because my 2012 Predictions, written on January 2, 2012, were kind of on the doomy and gloomy side of things. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Continuing the tradition that started when the earth was young (or last year… depending on your definition of “time”), I’d like to present this year’s version of “Predictions Guaranteed to be Wrong, Or Your Money Back”! As we saw in the report card post, last year, I went 4.5 for 7 in predictions. I hope to bat lower for this year’s predictions. Of course, I can guarantee 0 for 7 by making ridiculous predictions, like “The Jets will win the SuperBowl”.
Without further ado, the predictions for 2012…
Say hello to Watson
Over on Facebook, in one of the real estate discussion groups I’m involved with, Loren Sanders posted the following:
I saw a documentary called “The Pit” about floor traders on the New York Board of Trade. It shows before and after they were bought out by an electronic trading company ICE. It is not an exact parallel to real estate but it shows clearly that progress waits for no one and no one (or company) is bigger than than market. That is my long winded lead in to: What are you doing now so your service will be relevant 2 years from now?
That sparked a bunch of discussion. The trailer for The Pit, by the way is here:
The movie is about the impact of technology on the Wall Street traders in the actual trading pits. Loren raises a really interesting question.
As it happens, I just contributed a chapter to Stefan Swanepoel’s upcoming report, speculating on the state of real estate in 2022. I’d call it science fiction, since ten years might as well be fifty years for trying to see where technology is headed. But I did find something while researching and thinking about that which is worth thinking about more.
Because of space limitations in print format, I couldn’t really get into all of the detail I’ve been thinking about. So I figured I’d think out loud here with you all.
A 1982 Osborne Executive next to a 2007 iPhone
I’m giving a presentation tomorrow at the Nextgen Realtor Group of the Houston Association of REALTORS. I do believe the actual title of my presentation, as in the program itself, is called Welcome to Dystopia. Somehow, it seems, I’ve become the Cassandra of the real estate industry. But in researching for the presentation, I ran across something that I wanted to think about more. And since writing blogposts is one of my primary ways to think about things… here it goes.
Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors one can fit on an integrated circuit board doubles every two years. (Originally, it was doubling every year, then every 18 months, and these days, the accepted ratio seems to be double every two years.) This principle is taken more or less as gospel within the computer hardware industry, and of course, the computer software industry designs its programs with Moore’s Law in mind. You write code that can barely function on today’s machines, and by the time you finish all the QA testing and roll it out, computers have gotten faster and more powerful.
So a ‘shorthand’ expression of Moore’s Law is that computing power doubles every two years.
Okay, you’re thinking… so what? We knew that. Duh!