How specific do you need to be? Do you need to provide implementation details? I give full marks for the XML Database prediction because he began with this statement: &quot;Nobody likes to do O&#x2F;R mapping; everyone just wants a solution.&quot; And then: &quot;XML is the most popular vehicle for representing loosely-structured, heirarchical data.&quot;<p>I could quite happily interpret that as &quot;schemaless databases (using the most popular vehicle for representing loosely-structured data) will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011&quot;. I&#x27;ll take marks off for 2011 being too early, but not for the datatype choice.<p>It&#x27;s unfortunate that he went into more detail by describing XPath and current support for XML operations, but I feel that&#x27;s just justification for the specificity of the datatype choice in the title.<p>I totally agree with you regarding laptops and apple though. &quot;New and shiny&quot; is hardly a prediction, and the specificity is relevant to the prediction.