For those of you who don’t read Tim Bray on a semi-regular basis, well, why not? His Ongoing blog is one of my favorites.

He’s always a good read, and he is currently in the midst of a series of essays that is designed to give a key as to Which new technologies will make it, and which will fail?.

Basically, he first takes 7 successful technologies (such as SQL/RDBMS and Java) and 7 pretty much failures (SGML, AI). Then, he sets up a list of possible success predictors one could use to judge potential of technology (management buy-in, buzz generators) and see how winners and losers would be ranked – in retrospect – by each of these criteria. In other words, can you establish some success predictors to help you see what technologies will flourish and which will fail??

It’s interesting; through about five of the success predictors currently, there is really no good indicator discovered.

Bray notes that he is ranking these technologies on his own, and the seven winners and losers are – again – his picks, and many not be a good representative sample and so on.

But he’s been in the biz for years (he’s co-author of the XML spec, joined a W3C committee at the request of Tim Berners-Lee), so you can quibble with some choices, rant about some rankings and so on, but – overall – it seems (to me) fairly balanced.

And this is just an exercise, not necessarily a road map for future tech.

But it’s interesting. Right now, there is no way to tell if a product will be the next PointCast or the next iPod…

That’s both not surprising and unsettling.

Imagine how the VCs must feel.