3x20: According To The Prophecy

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we present our predictions for 2021!

  • Stuart:
    • [00:11:11] Remote work starts to hollow out cities and as a result, three major cities see population drops (or the populations drop more than they already were)
    • [00:17:20] Social media sites band together to avoid fake news (and government regulation of what they do) with some sort of shared "credibility checker"
    • [00:23:25] Amazon buy Zoom
    • [00:25:10] Bonuses: somebody buys Canonical; at least one of us has not been vaccinated; Jono continues to buy Apple stuff
  • Jeremy:
    • [00:31:30] Jeff Bezos will become the richest American who has ever lived (he tops around $340b)
    • [00:33:10] Google will make their largest acquisition in the history of the company
    • [00:37:35] Bitcoin price will go below $5,000 or above $55,000
    • [00:39:45] Facebook will lose 15%-20% of their active user count
    • [00:41:40] Bonuses: Amazon builds a publicly-available general-purpose search engine; a security breach larger than Solarwinds will be discovered and will materially impact the position of a major cloud provider or public tech company
  • Jono:
    • [00:45:55] Sony will release the second version of the PSVR headset
    • [00:49:25] A COVID "vaccine passport" will be required for at least three major airlines and five major countries
    • [00:54:50] Donald Trump's Twitter account will be disabled at least twice but will not be banned [editor's note! this has happened once already, in between us recording this show and us releasing it!]
    • [00:56:25] Zoom will start build a complete remote-working offering (the "Sharepointisation" of Zoom, as christened by Jeremy) and acquire at least one major remote-working company
    • [01:01:25] Bonuses: Facebook Spaces will still be shit (even though it has been shut down since 2019, so maybe Facebook Horizon will be shit); Canonical will not get acquired (!)

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

Download from https://badvoltage.org

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

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Some one’s going to buy Zoom, not sure it will be Amazon. But unlike Webex, Teams, and Meet that are part of a larger offering Zoom is just video conferencing. Once this pandemic is over and IT departments aren’t spending 25 hours a day supporting remote workers someone is going to say hey, we already pay for XYZ that includes video conferencing so we don’t really need a separate Zoom licence.

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What happens if someone announces they’re going to buy Canonical, but it doesn’t go through by the end of the year then?

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Screenshot_2021-01-08 (4) Profile Twitter
Screenshot_2021-01-08 (4) Profile Twitter798×571 20.1 KB

… and Jono looses a point. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/08/twitter-trump-dorsey

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  1. Jono will score 0.33 points for his 2021 predictions.
  2. A major public utility (electricity, water, sewer) in the USA will suffer a successful cyber attack that will endanger people and the environment.
  3. Public utilities will continue to use Windows and keep critical systems connected to the Internet.
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Not being smug about Jono losing a point, just happy about the twitter ban.

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… and it’s final: