Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. - Niels Bohr

In a comment to Doug's blog on licensing, Joel Garry, pointed me to this article from June 1997 predicting what we'd be doing today.  I found it quite an interesting read, with some absolutely on the money predictions.

• DBA profession as we know it will evolve into a set of more specialized jobs, some of which will involve non-DBA activities
• Ads will announce employment searches for "SAP v. N/Oracle v. M specific DBAs."
• Intelligent agents and self-monitoring systems will be required to control increasingly dispersed and diverse distributed databases. These developments will whipsaw DBAs. On one hand, the demand for DBA services will be undercut as jobs are increasingly de-skilled and automated, with centralized control ever more possible for widely distributed systems. On the other hand, the geometric explosion in the number and functionality of machines ensures that DBA expertise will be more valued than ever
• The placement of application code and business rules will continue to be an issue: Should they be stored in the middle tier of an architecture or in the database itself? The introduction of application servers, Web servers, DataBlades, Data Cartridges, relational extenders, and new development tools cloud the issue further
•  Specialized servers will proliferate as application servers for homegrown or customized packaged applications

as well as the misses.

• the future DBA will work less overtime
• Cheap holographic memory will hold terabytes of data in less than a cubic centimeter of space
• IS managers will develop new hiring criteria. They won't look for specific skills as much as broad experience and the ability to adapt quickly to the product du jour
• All client machines will have a local database system that must be synchronized periodically with a central server

Read through and wonder. I also liked the musing on the impact of the Nintendo Generation on our industry by the way. 

Anyway late Friday ten years after seems like a good time to add some preditcions of my own for the decade that will be 2007-20017. Think of it as some survivors, some deaths and some births.