Trend 1: Android on every device
The 2014 claim: Android would spread from phones into cameras, refrigerators, car stereos, watches, televisions and headphones — even onto PCs — because whatever sits on top, “if Android is running underneath, the platform will dominate”.
2026 verdict: largely right. Android Auto, Android TV and Wear OS made the embedded prediction real, and the sharpest sentence — that the UI layer can be simplified while the platform wins underneath — describes exactly how those products work. The PC flank failed: “PC Plus” never happened, and Windows outlived the prophecy. Score: 7/10.
Trend 2: open source will find new ways to squeeze us
The 2014 claim: most open-source companies ship “a demonstration version” and keep a secret sauce; the sustainable ones would learn to “tighten the screws in a comfortable way without scaring away customers”.
2026 verdict: uncomfortably right. The model now has a name — open core — and the screw-tightening became a headline genre: relicensing waves, cloud-provider clauses and source-available licences across the following decade were precisely this prediction playing out. Score: 9/10.
Trend 3: WordPress web apps will abound
The 2014 claim: building from scratch was becoming a mistake; plug-in platforms like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal would absorb more and more of the web’s functionality.
2026 verdict: half right, instructively wrong. WordPress did conquer — roughly two-fifths of the web runs on it — but as a content platform. Applications went the other way, toward JavaScript frameworks and engineered back ends; Joomla and Drupal faded rather than rose. Our own practice lived the split, as our WordPress auction assessment records: experiments on WordPress, businesses on engineered platforms. Score: 5/10.
Trend 4: plug-ins will replace full-fledged programs
The 2014 claim: programmers would “write more snippets and fewer applications”, because a small piece of glue code leveraging an ecosystem beats a monolith that must do everything alone.
2026 verdict: right in spirit, bigger than predicted. The npm-scale package economy, API-first products, app-store extension ecosystems and serverless functions all embody it — and the AI era’s tool-and-plugin architectures extended the pattern further than 2014 could see. The savvy-programmer advice — learn the host APIs, string together parts — reads like modern career guidance. Score: 8/10.
Trend 5: JavaScript for everything
The 2014 claim: JavaScript would dominate beyond the browser — servers via Node.js, mobile via HTML5 views — with only mainframes (COBOL), biology (Python) and systems (C) holding out, while “JavaScript gobbles the world”.
2026 verdict: mostly right, with one miss. Node, Electron and React-style frameworks made JavaScript the web’s lingua franca, exactly as claimed. The miss is telling: native mobile did not dissolve into web views — our own practice went the other way, to Kotlin-first Android and native iOS, because the performance gap the author waved off still mattered. And Python’s escape from “biologists” into AI dominance was the decade’s biggest unpredicted language story. Score: 7/10.
The scorecard
Present-day editorial perspective.
Thirty-six out of fifty — a genuinely respectable decade-ahead average, and the pattern in the misses is the real lesson: the 2014 predictions were strongest about economics and ecosystems (open core, plug-in economies) and weakest wherever they assumed convergence on a single winner (Android PCs, JavaScript mobile, WordPress apps). Technology space keeps turning out to be wider than trend lists expect — a caution we apply to today’s confident predictions, including the AI ones we now make in our own AI practice.