SEOs fail because they tend thinking only tactically and forget strategy. In this deck, Gianluca presents the most interesting trends in Google Search, which we can discover simply by looking with attention the same Google sources: patents, papers, acquisitions, people hired and research blog post.
Video and images, Parsing and Semantics, Local Search and Personalization, Natural Language and Machine Learning.
These are the things we should create an SEO strategy around, and not fixate ourselves on Unnamed (or Fred) updates.