The arrival of summer has led me to reflect on the 2006 predictions I made late last year. You’re not going to believe this, but we’re past the halfway mark and almost none of them have come true. In hopes of saving face, here now is a revised set of predictions to close out the year:

• A new summer blockbuster will sweep the box office: “An Inconvenient Truth Returns,” starring the Fourth Amendment (Lindsay Lohan).
• Taking a page from Google’s playbook, Yahoo will announce that its engineers need spend only 80% of their time on core company projects. The remaining 20% will be spent helping Iran enrich Uranium. After outrage erupts, Yahoo will issue a terse statement that “This policy is rigorously consistent with our moral code. Just last month, we bent over for both the U.S. and China.”
• The propaganda war will reach fever pitch after Microsoft executive Brad Miller blasts Google’s “inconsistent, inane and ultimately dishonest” naming scheme for its beta products. Miller is Assistant Passport to the Vice-VP of Windows Live.com.NET.

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I turn 21 on Monday. I would like one of these to wear while pitching to investors.

Mike Connor is really the one who deserves it, since he’s been kicking some serious ass on Firefox 2. But does he have the figure to pull it off?

Interviewers are asking my opinion of Internet Explorer 7. This, of course, is a softball. They tee it up anticipating a homerun account of how Firefox trounces IE.

But I’ve been answering truthfully: IE7 is a solid product. It vastly improves upon IE6 with useful features like anti-phishing that Firefox 2 will replicate.

I have nothing to gain from gratuitously denigrating IE. Firefox is and always has been about serving users, not crushing competition. It is scary to think what life would be like if I woke up each day thirsting for the fall of another company. If Microsoft hadn’t abandoned IE, there would have been no gap to fill—no user frustrations to tackle—and we probably would not have started Firefox.

But they did abandon it. For four years, and in the face of rampant pop-up ads, viruses and spyware, Microsoft left for dead a browser that hundreds of millions of people rely on. They’ve admitted it, and at the Webstock conference, Program Manager Tony Chor apologized for it. I’ve met Tony personally. I believe his apology.

Then I see the IE7 homepage proclaiming that “we heard you” and I just get furious, because I know that “you” isn’t really you, grandpa, Meredith, Jamie, Fletcher, Matt, Mike, Phil, it can’t be, because you complained for years and nobody heard you. It’s not you; it’s us. It’s Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock, Maxthon. Only the drip drip of leaky marketshare echoes in Redmond.

I know this is just the game, know that the IE marketing team wrote that sales pitch. The pitch I’m writing now isn’t to them but to the developers. You are working at a company that finds positive impact a mere side effect of competitive destruction.¹ In thirty years, do you want to look back and think “I did that” or “I stopped that company from doing that”?

I urge you to find a company that truly listens to them, not us. It is much more rewarding.