2001: A Spaced Odyssey

Ah January… the month of heavy drinking, snow shoveling, the Superbowl and heavy drinking. It’s also the customary time for magazine editors to dust off their crystal balls and peer into the future. Unfortunately, my crystal ball was destroyed in a freak garage accident involving a Yamaha motorcycle and a set of tent poles.

As a result, the following predictions for the year 2001 are based on nothing more mystical than horse sense and sleep deprivation (and heavy drinking).

Uh oh! Alan is smiling!
Alan Greenspan doesn’t like to appear in public nowadays, and not for the same reasons as before. Yes, stock markets still rise and fall on the color of his tie. Yes, he still has to answer infuriatingly stupid questions. (“For heaven’s sake, what part of ‘Counteraccrual capital flow transience’ don’t you understand?!”)

No, the reason Alan hates going out in public today is the overwhelming urge to say, “I told you so,” and laugh long and loud at all the simpletons who couldn’t see the current tech-stock meltdown coming from 10 fiscal years away.

OK, maybe that’s unfair. Perhaps most people did see it coming. They just didn’t know when to expect it, or what to do about it. And after all, what’s wrong with profiting from a little irrational exuberance? So now we’re suffering a hangover after the party of a lifetime. And for companies whose business plans counted on a never-ending bonanza, the agony has only begun. My prediction is that 2001 will make 2000 look like a walk in the park in terms of stock-market volatility and financial turmoil.

Dot-compost
Obviously dot-coms have felt the worst of the tech-stock backlash. But what is a dot-com company, anyway? The term has become synonymous with get-rich-quick schemes hatched by smug college dropouts with nothing better to do than chase their tails while chanting, “new economy… e-business solutions … leverage synergy.”

I predict companies will shed dot-com suffixes faster than Sen. Hillary Rodham ditches old what’s-his-name. A few struggling e-commerce retailers will battle one another to dominate the online flea market space until at last they’re engulfed by brick-and-mortar companies like Wal-Mart.

I also predict that Joe Consumer will fail to notice that anything has changed.

Watch out for that satellite!
NASA recently released (grudgingly) its analysis of risks from falling Iridium satellite parts. It seems the chances of someone getting killed in the constellation’s planned de-orbit are about one in 250.

Some poor slob with a target on his head just got a reprieve, however. A Maryland company acquired the cursed constellation and signed up the U.S. Department of Defense for a two-year service contract. What’s more, Iridium Satellite LLC is offering users 10 kilobits of bandwidth, 95 percent service availability and a much smaller handset — at least compared to the baseball bat-sized monstrosity they sold before — all for 80 cents a minute.

Iridium’s cautionary tale is a prime example of what happens when people become more interested in technical whiz-bang than in cold, hard economic reality. I predict, however, that companies will continue learning this lesson the hard way, again and again, ad nauseam.

AOL/Time Warfare
The AOL/Time Warner merger is near its conclusion. So far, the aforementioned Joe Consumer is about as interested in its ramifications as he is about the contents of his hot dogs. I predict the public will begin to care minutely only when video is released showing a slap-fight between Steve Case and Gerald Levin. All the worry over market power will fade in a cacophony of cultural rancor. AOL’s irresistible force will encounter the immovable object of Time Warner with explosive results, and a breakup will ensue in 2002.

Shortly thereafter, Turner Network Television will release a miniseries titled Two’s a Crowd, with John Ritter playing Case and Jean-Claude Van Damme playing Levin. Critics will praise it, but TV viewers will largely ignore it, opting instead for a reality-based version of Baywatch.

Life goes on.