Pharmaceutical companies will be using more RFID than the consumer packaged goods industry in 18 months. That's according to a Meta Group study, as reported in Information Week.

Now this is a pretty dramatic prediction. Yet, the interesting thing is how less irrationally exhuberant this report is than some others. For instance, this report suggests the U.S. FDA was overly optimistic when it predicted a few months ago that most drugs would be shipped with RFID tags at the case and pallet level within 3 years.

It'll be an interesting exercise 2 years from now to go back and read some of the early research reports. I expect we'll chuckle over some of the more optimistic predictions.

Not that I think RFID won't take off. It will. But market-shifting technologies always take longer than you think.