The sky is falling.
Pen and paper RPGs have had their day, and although there is still a market out there for small companies to make decent money on them, a company the size of WotC (with the demands made by Hasbro) simply cannot make enough money from them.
And so they've been trying various things to keep them afloat - a new Red Box to recapture lapsed players, a new 5e to recapture old-edition players, a DDI to bring in lots of subscription money, Fortune Cards to introduce a CCG element to the game.
I expect 5e to be a good game. I expect it to fail to recapture any significant number of old-edition players, to fail to end the Edition Wars, and thus to fail to do significantly better than 4e did.
By 2015, D&D will be effectively dead as a pen-and-paper RPG, at least by that name. It will live on in the form of Pathfinder, the various retro-clones, 3rd party support for 4e, but not as "Dungeons & Dragons" as we know it.
(And I'm not even sure WotC have done anything fundamentally wrong along the way. They certainly made some missteps with the DDI, and were desperately unlucky in some other regards, but they were probably on the right track. I think they've just been hit with impossible expectations for a product that has simply had its day.)
Oh, and yes, I really hope I'm wrong.