Anderson

Mark Anderson, whose influential newsletter is read by technology leaders across the globe, including Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, was in New York City last night hosting his annual predictions dinner. As part of the evening's activities, the Friday Harbor technology pundit offered his top 10 tech predictions for the coming year. And one of his prognostications -- specifically item #8 -- certainly will stir the pot with some of his better known readers in Redmond. Anderson predicted that -- except for the games business -- it is "game over" for Microsoft in the consumer business.

In an interview before the dinner with The New York Times, Anderson went into even more cutting detail saying that "Microsoft doesn’t have consumer DNA” and that it is a "loser in phones." Ouch.

Here are the rest of Anderson's predictions.

1. 2010 will be The year of Platform Wars: netbooks, cell phones, pads, Cloud standards. Clouds will tend to support the consumer world (Picnik, Amazon), enterprises will continue to build out their own data centers, and Netbook sector growth rates continue to post very large numbers.

2. 2010 will be The year of Operating System Wars: Windows 7 flavors, MacOS, Linux flavors, Symbian, Android, Chrome OS, Nokia Maemo 5. The winners, in order in unit sales: W7, MacOS, Android. W7, ironically, by failure of imagination and by its PC-centric platform, actively clears space for others to take over the OS via mobile platforms.

3. All content goes mobile. Everything gets tagged, multi-channeled, and the walled gardens open up. TV and movie content, particularly, break free of old trapped business models. We are moving toward watching first-run TV and movies on phones, for a price. Which leads to no. 4.

4. MobileApps and Mobile Content drive MicroPayments, which move from niche to mainstream payment models. Payment for content will split along age lines, at around 35; above, pay; below, don’t pay.

5. The Phone vs. the PC: A Split Along Two Paths (enterprise vs. consumer) a. fully integrated user experience, poor back-end (mail and calendar services, etc.) integration; the Apple environment; b. splintered user experience, like WMobile vs. WPC, with integrated back end. c. Windows sells integration in the plumbing, Apple does it on the screen. Note: The phone is now the most interesting computer platform, and it is driving innovation: software, business models, distribution. Netbooks are next up as drivers.

6. There will be a Cloud Catastrophe in 2010 that limits Cloud growth by raising security issues and restricting enterprise trust. CIOs will see the cloud as the doorstep for industrial espionage.

7. A huge chasm opens in computing, between Consumer and Enterprise (government/business.), with Apple, Google and most Asian hardware companies in Consumer, and Dell, IBM, Cisco, and MS on the Enterprise side. HP will straddle both. Before 2010, talk was all about unifying consumer and enterprise. Now, talk will be about their split.

8. Microsoft loses in its Consumer play: except for gaming, it is Game Over for MS in Consumer. This will make Consumer the place to be, where the most robust and exciting change artists will work.

9. News media that survive will move to the subscription model, in whole or in part, along age lines. (See no. 4)

10. Connecting remote data to people and things in real time will lead to a series of exciting new devices and applications. Possible examples: real time comparison and recipe-driven shopping, facial recognition (in social spaces) linked to bios, self-guided tours by phone, voice-queried information about your personal environment.

John Cook is co-founder of TechFlash. Follow on Twitter @johnhcook.