Sneak has spent the festive period munching mince pies and pondering the future. Apparently the pies contained a proportion of spirits. Nonetheless, these forecasts about progress in the IT industry can be relied upon to come true.

Microsoft Office 2007 will arrive, leaving the helpdesks of early-adopters tied up in knots - or rather wrapped up in ribbons - as users fail to grasp the innovative new user interface. Learning to use Office's "ribbon" interface will prove as painless and intuitive as ice-skating.

Google users searching for help with Office 2007 will find lots of links to Google's online apps. Google will insist that such antics cannot be classed as evil, because of Microsoft's monopoly.

Meanwhile, searchers employing the fledgling human-powered Wikia Search will find that attempts to locate help with Office 2007 lead mostly to OpenOffice, to pages that spell Microsoft with a dollar sign, and to blogs about Buffy the Vampire Slayer's inventive use of letter-openers.

Moore's law will continue, allowing AMD and Intel to pile ever-greater numbers of cores onto a single substrate. As its lead in core-count erodes, AMD will rediscover its fondness for marketing-based competition, trumping Intel's new Core 4 DoDeco with the AMD Core Blimey It's Got a Lot of Cores.

Every IT provider will claim its products are the greenest. Each will provide its own benchmark to back up its assertion. Efforts to establish an industry standard for the total carbon footprint of products will founder as participants argue over where to draw the line: whether to consider not just the manufacture and distribution of the product and its components, and the energy expended in designing it, and the energy required by the commuting workforce who build it, and the carbon output of marketing and advertising activities, but also the hot-air produced by pointless talking shops and pompous standards committees.

Oracle will make business history by launching a hostile takeover bid for Oracle. The firm will lend itself the money for the venture in an innovative piece of recursive bookkeeping that will keep the debt forever one quarter in the future. The Sarbanes-Oxley rules on transparency will be revisited as a result, to enforce a new level of openness. Publicly-listed companies will be required to maintain their fiscal files as real-time wikis.

And Microsoft will quietly provide a download to graft XP-style menus onto Office 2007.

01 Jan 2007