His second prediction is that "Unsolicited commercial e-mail will shrink." I think that this is an understatement. I'd be surprised if they even existed at all. Mind you, I've touched on this before (in video). Come to think of it, I think solicited or not, e-mail marketing is going the way of Davi Hasselhoff: a curious oddity that lingers, but no one can understand what to use it for anymore.

Joe's third prediction is that "Search will remain an oligopoly, with 4 major players and little else outside of it. Google, Microsoft, eBay and Amazon." Well, there's a sober-minded moderate path if I've seen one. The other two options is that Google monopolizes all search, or that specialized search such as vertical and local fragment the market back into a million splinter engines. I think I'll stick with Joe on this one, though.

His fourth expectation is that "Text-messaging, IM, and E-mail will converge." I'm no expert, but his makes perfect sense to me. In fact, the only thing holding it back are hardware constraints, but those are well on their way to being ironed out. Blackberries are just one example, but imagine if everyone had one: we'd need a new word to describe it because it wouldn't quite be any of the three specifically.

Joe's fifth prediction is that "Affiliate networks will be replaced with affiliate platforms." I'm not so sure about this one if only because consumers tend to only want to trust familiar brand names with their personal information. Besides, if Amazon is still one of the big four (see reason #3), then it's hard to imagine the world of customer direct fulfillment doing anything but becoming more centralized and monopolized.

The sixth prediction is (to me), so self-evident that I doubt it needed expression. It's that "Television and streaming online video will be essentially the same thing." I mean, what we're really talking about here is how content is actually going to be stored, retrieved, and delivered. The internet is simply helping television producers think differently about such logistics.

Finally, Joe reifies marketing's oldest, most respected cliche by predicting that "Word of mouth will still be the most effective way to gain mindshare and build a lasting brand." The only thing that's going to change about this, in fact, is what counts for a mouth. It's no longer going to be an organ on my body projecting sound waves at people who are in physical reach of me. No, it's going to be any number of media being used to express a sentiment that will be disseminated through an interface that can reach thousand, or even million, of users all at once. In other words, all that will change is that my voice will be much, much louder.