I see the Shifted Librarian is reporting on this story that says the CD will be an obsolete format in 5 years. That’s kind of a bold statement, but the “five years” as a time horizon has a familiar smell to it. Sure enough, if you look you’ll see the claim is being made by a researcher at Forrester Research. I can remember back five years ago when I was working in the ebook industry and they were predicting that in five years the ebook would be the predominant format for books and would be a multibillion dollar market. They are only off by a factor of 100, which is pretty good for them.
Why does anyone buy their expensive ass reports when they are correct on their predictions less often than a monkey with a dart board? Their pronouncements always have a five year window, I’m assuming because that’s far enough away that a lot can happen, so it is harder to immediatly call bullshit on them. Also, it’s long enough that by the time the prediction has been shown to be completely erroneous, no one remembers. I want to be an “analyst” too – make some crazy assertions that seldom if ever pan out, and charge people lots of money to hear my nonsense. I guarantee I could make predictions no less accurately than Forrester.
5 years 10 or whenever, CD’s days are definitely numbered. I’ve lived to see it happen to vinyl records, 8-tracks and cassettes. Just a matter of time for CD’s, when you can hold a little device the size of a Bic lighter and have 2500 songs enclosed. Bye, bye CD.