Old Gordon Moore's Almanac 2007

Posted on 21 Dec 2006 at 15:37

UK construction company Jarvis wins the contract to supply GPS systems to cars sold in the UK.

The UK continues to bake in the heatwave. Water companies warn of impending drought. Shares in the privatised water companies rise.

Microsoft implements an interpreter for the Open Document Format in its Office suite. It performs poorly, failing to draw the layout structure of documents properly.

July
Microsoft announces a public private partnership with the government to manage UK libraries, rebranding them as 'Knowledge Bases'. To take a book out you need a hotmail account.

Rising sea levels threaten many coastal towns, including London, Southampton, Plymouth and Liverpool. The government responds by building containing walls protecting the urban centres, using the difference in levels to generate hydro-electric power and then de-salinating the incoming sea water to supply homes in the area with drinking water. Shares in water companies plunge.

The first cars emerge on to forecourts sporting the Jarvis-built GPS 'black-box'. It weighs 50 kg. Prime minister Gordon Brown adds another 10p tax on petrol under his 'environment! environment! environment!' policy.

August
Microsoft updates Vista with the WinFS filesystem. People return from their summer holidays to find their computers have turned into a lump of metal and plastic after the update fails.

Microsoft announces even more enterprise products resulting from its partnership with HP. Novell states Microsoft interoperability technologies to which it refers as 'the future of computing', are being finalised.

Share-holders in UK water companies launch a class action suit against the Government for its actions in undermining the business of the privatised companies.

September
Microsoft ploughs ahead with its iPod-killing Zune solution, to prove Redmond really does have the panache to take on Apple's beautifully styled music player. It launches two new colours in addition to black, white and brown, in the form of light grey, and tan. The new Zune hues quickly become known as 'dandruff' and 'earwax'.

The USPTO grants Apple a patent covering the creation of standalone musical works, or songs.

Google launches its new Mind search service. Alongside, Web, Images, Groups, News and so on, Mind allows users to search the cranium of any identifiable individual, either by a keyword search or a live stream of current thoughts.

Torrential rainstorms sweep the nation.

October
Privacy concerns are raised over Google Mind when a live Google Mind stream of Bill Gates delivering a keynote at the launch of Internet Information Services 2007 showed his brain trained almost exclusively on the cleavage of a Microsoft Senior VP throughout the event.

The SMS programming language spawns a new generation of coding 'hoodies' who desert the shopping malls where they previously loitered and now join one of the many universities running undergraduate courses on the subject.

The music industry renews its call for variable pricing of music on iTunes. Apple lawyers pointedly shuffle its 'song' patent paperwork. RIAA bosses smile sheepishly and agree everything was 'just fine' as it was.

November
Google Mind searches of opposition leader David Cameron show a clear blue sky.

SCO loses its case against IBM over misappropriating Unix technology into AIX. SCO President Darl McBride immediately files suit against SCO alleging he was misled as to the merit of its Unix claims, without which he would never have joined the company.