&gt; AWS didn&#x27;t come out until 2006, and it was considered pretty revolutionary at the time.<p>He did work at Amazon until 2005, so he likely saw the internal development that resulted in what would become the publicly-available AWS. And some of his other predictions strike me as being heavily influenced by what he saw working at Amazon. Companies like Amazon and Google tend to encounter problems a few years before the rest of the world realizes that those are even concerns. So making predictions about the industry at large based on the cutting edge technologies used inside those companies is actually a pretty reasonable assumption.<p>For example, according to Wikipedia, Dynamo and BigTable were developed in 2004. So while NoSQL would have seemed revolutionary to almost everyone outside of Amazon and Google in 2004, to people working inside those companies, that prediction was basically predicting that their ideas would work and become very successful. I&#x27;d also bet there were a ton of Google engineers that saw Map Reduce before it was made public that could have predicted in 2003 that computationally-heavy tasks would be primarily distributed in a few years. And there&#x27;s probably a bunch of Intel employees who could have predicted in 2004 that the chips Intel would be selling a decade later would run at the same GHz as their current offering since 2005 was about the time that they switched to adding more cores.<p>When you&#x27;re ahead of the curve, you can see what&#x27;s coming around the corner before the rest of us.