I think it's impressive. If you read some other predictions and if you're a fan of Sci-Fi, you'll see that this one is actually pretty close for a change.
Try making a linear prediction for 2100 and see how hard it is.
The Law(?) of Accelerating Returns implies it will be enormously much harder to predict from now to 2100 than it was from 1900 to 2000. (Or that a linear prediction will be enormously much less accurate).
My skill at predictions is better. He tried to predict, I didn't. ;)
Meat brains aren't subject to the law (yet). We don't change ourselves so we don't get a growing return on our own improvements.
I ought to have the same skill at predictions (environment, nutrition, education, age, culture, upbringing, effort, normal human variations in ability and the quirk of ever increasing IQ levels notwithstanding).
Compare a recent car with one from 10 years ago, they seem nicer for the same money.
Computers are, obviously, better - more transistors in CPUs, much more cache, much bigger harddrives, cheaper memory.
Digital cameras are way better, not only higher megapixel sensors and larger, cheaper storage cards, larger LCDs but also more realtime processing than before with face-detection, Sony's smile-detection, and they're around the same price.
Broadband in the UK has gone from being a new choice for the leading edge, to being commonplace, to flattening out the choices so 8Mb is the standard, to ADSL2+ being available at the larger exchanges outside London.
Popular screen technology for computers and TVs has almost entirely switched to LCDs when it was CRTs for everybody 10 years ago.
The first iPod I bought was a 3rd generation 40Gb model. It would have been in 2003 or so, now I have one that's cheaper, lighter, smaller, faster, nicer screen, longer battery life, which is also a video player, phone, emailer and has 3d acceleration hardware.
What about the new Macbook's unibody construction? They couldn't mill cases out of solid aluminium in large quantities without CNC machines. They have been around for years, but presumably it's only a small number of years that it's been precise/cheap/available enough for Apple to use it profitably. I took a few laptops apart around 2000, there were lots of parts, widely spread out. Check the disassembly of the new Macbook - the mainboard is tiny. It's almost certainly largely built by very precise robots and designed with the help of a lot of computing power.
USB has gone from being a bit of a joke (in 2000 I had a USB Zip 100 drive) to being the file transfer and peripheral connection medium of choice with multi-Gb sticks for sale anywhere and everywhere.
Could you have bought a roomba in 2000 to sweep your floors for you? Or a friendly robotics Robomow? Or a games console with built in, low hassle, online ability? Or a BluRay player and a HD TV?
OK, my life as a day-to-day event is different because I work with and on computers using the internet, and that's where I can see the changes, but on a day to day basis it's much the same, the same sort of transport, food, books, consumables, etc.
Although I could now (had I the money) buy a car which would pre-arm the brakes if I was too close to the car in front so they will apply quicker, parallel park for me, alert me if there's someone in the blind spots, silence the carphone incoming calls when cornering hard as it would be too distracting to ring then. None of these things were around 10 years ago.
Nothing seems much different, but then most of my life is spent wearing woven thread, sitting on wood or plasticfoamy chairs, eating plants and being around brick buildings. At that level, how much change do you expect?
Yes but... With the exception of games, there's really not much you can do on a 2008 PC that you can't on the 2000 PC that I am typing this on now. Email, web browsing, word processing/spreadsheets, IM, music/movies, etc, the bread-and-butter stuff that most people do most of the time hasn't changed over that period.
Things are the-same-but-better now. HDs are bigger, broadband is, err, broader, screens have more pixels. There have been no major shifts of the magnitude of "the web being invented". You could have linearly projected 2008 from 2000, I reckon, even in the tech sector which is the fastest moving of all. It would have been much harder to forecast 1998 from 1990.
That's kind of true - yet you could with a powerful PC of today leave Vista's voice recognition running all the time, almost dedicating a core to it, if you will. You couldn't previously as it was too demanding. I can leave many browser windows open because the overhead of many windows of interpreted javascript is minimal. You can use expose and similar as if they were free because the OS can offload to a beefy video processor. I run a Windows Server on my Mac laptop in a virtual machine barely thinking twice at what a marvel it is, at work we run 8 virtual servers on a physical box that takes up a quarter of the space of our 6 year old server.
People in general might do the same things, but that's not because the hardware can only do the same things.
An important change that you left out is the plunge in the cost of web startups, which has been enabled by the plunge in cost of computer hardware and network services and the availability of free web application frameworks and infrastructure software. The activities of most of the people that use this service could not have existed in 2000.
Try making a linear prediction for 2100 and see how hard it is.