Steve Yegge Grades His Own Predictions
I think he's being overly harsh on himself. As he said in the original rant "the predictions themselves don't matter! Most of them are probably wrong. The point of the exercise is the exercise itself, not in what results"<p>Imagine someone in 1850 making the prediction that "by 1950, everyone will have  a horse". Though they say "horse", they really mean "everyone will be able to afford their own personal transport", as a reflection on the changing socioeconmic something something. And they would be right. Sure the horse is mechanical, isn't shaped like a horse, and consumes petrol, but your prediction is correct, even though you didn't know exactly how it would play out.<p>The same is the of Yegge's XML DB prediction. If he was saying that XML is going to be amazing, then he's wrong. If he's saying the RDBMSes have problems, then he's right. And actually he's saying "RDBMSes suck, so something will replace them, and XML is big enough that it will be XML". So that looks like a 50% score to me.<p>With Apple, he's basically saying "apple is shiny, and shiny will win". That prediction has been 100% correct. The fact that iPads disrupted the laptop model means he's more correct than if they had just sold more Macbooks. 100% score here, IMO.