Oh boy, I'm so excited. No really, it's the end of the year--you know, that time when we make predictions about what's going to happen in the coming year. Try not to get too overwrought.

But before we subject you to yet another year's worth of predictions, let's take a look back at last year's predictions, shall we, and see just how well we did.

It's dangerous, I know, but it's probably more fun than predicting the future because you can see just how wrong I was.

How'd I do?:

Mobile governance will mature
I'm not sure how much maturity we saw, but I'm guessing probably not a heck of a lot. Many more companies surely hopped on the mobile band wagon, but most people are having enough trouble figuring out governance in the cloud, never mind on mobile devices. While I can't say for sure, my gut tells me it didn't happen.

Enterprise 2.0 will see lots of M&A activity
I said it seemed inevitable and I was right. Maybe there wasn't quite as much as I thought there would be, but I'm betting it's still going to happen, just at a slower pace than I previously believed. We saw a couple of players come off the board though including VMware buying Socialcast and Cisco buying Versly among others. There were rumors floating as the year ended about SAP buying Jive, which is scheduled to go public this week, but nothing official as yet.

There will be a high-profile legal case in the cloud
Here's one where I was wrong, wrong, wrong. No getting around it. While there may be some high-profile case at some point, it didn't happen in 2011 in spite of a number of a high-profile outages. At some time, this prediction has to come true, but sadly (for me at least), not this year.

ECM will continue to commoditize
This one was broad enough, that you could make an argument that it "continued." Yeah, yeah, that's it; but whether we saw a broad trend in this regard, I'm not so sure. Surely, the base-level content management services continued to commoditize, but we have yet to see the wide-spread adoption of CMIS that I thought would spur this trend on.

There will be a high-profile ECM merger
Hooray! I got one right, but it wasn't what I thought it would be. EMC didn't sell Documentum. As far as I know, it didn't even try to sell it. Nor did Open Text buy Autonomy, but Oracle bought Fatwire and in a much higher profile deal HP got Autonomy for a whopping $10 billion.

I'm not afraid to say when I'm wrong, and that's a good thing, because apparently I'm wrong a lot. Nonetheless, we'll subject you to the same exercise again simply because it's the end of the year and that's what we do. Be sure to look for our 2012 predictions in next week's issue, which will be our last issue of the year. - Ron