I think he&#x27;s being overly harsh on himself. As he said in the original rant &quot;the predictions themselves don&#x27;t matter! Most of them are probably wrong. The point of the exercise is the exercise itself, not in what results&quot;<p>Imagine someone in 1850 making the prediction that &quot;by 1950, everyone will have  a horse&quot;. Though they say &quot;horse&quot;, they really mean &quot;everyone will be able to afford their own personal transport&quot;, as a reflection on the changing socioeconmic something something. And they would be right. Sure the horse is mechanical, isn&#x27;t shaped like a horse, and consumes petrol, but your prediction is correct, even though you didn&#x27;t know exactly how it would play out.<p>The same is the of Yegge&#x27;s XML DB prediction. If he was saying that XML is going to be amazing, then he&#x27;s wrong. If he&#x27;s saying the RDBMSes have problems, then he&#x27;s right. And actually he&#x27;s saying &quot;RDBMSes suck, so something will replace them, and XML is big enough that it will be XML&quot;. So that looks like a 50% score to me.<p>With Apple, he&#x27;s basically saying &quot;apple is shiny, and shiny will win&quot;. That prediction has been 100% correct. The fact that iPads disrupted the laptop model means he&#x27;s more correct than if they had just sold more Macbooks. 100% score here, IMO.