Here at The Information we’ve come to enjoy the year-end ritual of publishing stories predicting what the coming year will look like for the tech industry. We also think it’s important to look back and grade ourselves on how well—or badly—we did with those predictions. Our grade point average for the 2021 tech predictions we made last December: 3.07 (on a traditional 4-point scale).
We nailed it with our prediction that Roku would go to war with media companies, that BuzzFeed would go public through a special purpose acquisition company (that’s scheduled to happen next month) and that Apple would start making concessions to app developers to stave off an antitrust crackdown. But we whiffed it with our predictions of a sharp slowdown in the overall SPAC market (instead it roughly doubled) and of acquisitions of enterprise software stalwarts Databricks or Redis (they each raised bundles of money instead).
