Bill Gates predicts *yawn* that cellphones running his mobile OS will beat out the iPod (assumed, of course, to be a stagnant, non-evolving device).

I'm not even a huge iPod fan (I have a rocking iAudio), but where do I even start ?? First of all, aside from this being essentially a marketing wish disguised as some kind of candid forecasting, there are so many problems with his approach to predicting the trends of technologies like the iPod. People think that because the iPod has transistors and is electronic that it is subject to the same rules as other strictly technical devices ... WRONG!!!

First of all, we'll excuse the marketing wish, I mean that's his job after all, to promote his stuff, by talking shmack and giving his take on desired directions. We'll also excuse him for his dodgy track record for predictions from the directions of the interweb back in the day to the Tablet PC and stuff like Passport, just to name a few.

What Bill doesn't seem to get (and this can sometimes be hard to get) is that the iPod is FASHION!! People don't buy iPods for the brilliant acoustics (try those earbuds on a train in a tunnel @ 50 mph) or the loads of harddisk space (check the success of iPod Mini and iShuffle).

People buy iPods 'cos they're sexy and it is fashionable to have 'em dangling on your person. People wanna style, and unlike most tings strictly technological (like the impact of transistor mismatch on the speed/accuracy/power tradeoff of analog CMOS circuits), fashions and tech-style trends are much more difficult to predict on the kind of time-scales that Bill is attempting .... he'd be much better off attempting to predict the directions for Miu Miu's or Valentino's 2006 Spring/Summer collections.

*ahem*