Tech trends to watch in 2004
Here's little different "tech trend" prediction from Fortune. The first one talks to the premise of this blog ... the power that evolves from the transparancy provided by internet.
Which corporation is going to properly harness that power and see their business flourish in new ways. This is not about html, or xml; those are a given. This is about internet, the network and the tools including web sites, browser based, blogs, yes blogs. Blogs are a just a simple way of using web sites, and infomation dissmination in a much more rapid fashion than can ever occur in traditional mechanistic methods.
CNN.com - Tech trends to watch in 2004 - Dec. 31, 2003
(FORTUNE.COM) -- 2004: Bring it on! We have momentum in the economy, in the technology industry, and even, for a change, in the stock market. We will continue next year to pluck the fruits of innovation.
It's been a confusing time, this past year of war, terrorism fears, and "tech doesn't matter." What a bunch of downers. Yet we tech-focused folk have a lot to keep us cheery. Sometimes it seems like most people just don't realize how much technology is changing all of our lives, mostly for the better. It will continue to do so in 2004, with continuing progress in, for instance, Internet telephony, data on cell phones, and home networking. But here are some less obvious ways:
The bottom-up wave continues: The Internet from the beginning was supposed to increase institutional transparency and push power to the edges of the network, as people learned more about how things really work and the facts about anything got harder to hide. It's happening. Prices are dropping on eBay for goods that formerly seemed rare -- because we now can see just how many baseball cards or used Rolexes there are out there. Politics is being turned upside down as Moveon.org and Howard Dean's campaign, among others, show how powerful the informed people on the edge can be when they're connected. Expect to see this trend have a growing impact in education (digital universities), the developing world (improved health care, education, and government responsiveness), business (is it a coincidence all these scandals are emerging just as everybody's getting connected?), entertainment (voting continues for the World Idol), etc.
Big Brother comes to town: In the age of super-cheap digital cameras and computers, anything can, and will, be monitored. Expect the debate about privacy to take a newly intense turn, as we all start to realize just how many of our actions are recorded, by video, biometric security systems, sensors in payment systems, spyware online, and more. There needs to be a real debate, too, because the benefits from all these systems are genuine. We may start to detect the impact of technological oversight on lowering crime rates across the U.S. It truly is harder to get away with it anymore. I, for one, am willing to trade off a certain amount of privacy in exchange. Note to John Ashcroft -- don't make me regret I said that.
Business keeps technologizing: The data suggesting a steep falloff in business investment in tech over the past few years have been misleading. Our obsession with the performance of technology stocks -- a hangover from the '90s -- is making us watch the wrong signals. The fact is, companies have been steadily improving their tech even though the results for technology companies have seemed stagnant. Marc Andreessen, he of the web browser, explained this recently: "Despite the computer industry recession, companies have been steadily escalating their investment in tech -- and it's really ramping up right now. But to do it people are buying commoditized servers from Dell or H-P that don't carry anywhere near the revenues of the old Unix servers. They're using open source so you don't see the software revenues. And they're developing software in-house using Java, which means you don't see the packaged software revenues." Here is why we see such a surge in productivity in American business -- you can improve the performance of your business without even spending that much anymore.
Open source continues to surge: Andreessen mentions it and rightly so. Linux is just the leading edge of a wave that will transform how companies use technology. Whether or not it will come to ordinary folks is unclear, though in some ways it already has. If you're a Mac user you're already seeing how powerful it can be when a software company incorporates open source into its products. Why do you think a little company like Apple can keep coming out with such innovative products as the Safari web browser, iPhoto, iTunes, or the iPod? Because they've gotten out of the scut-work business and are using open source components whenever they can, concentrating their energies on the truly new software ideas.
My enthusiasm for the positive benefits of technology can be almost Pollyanna-ish, so just to leaven that, I'll add this: If all the virus attacks and spam don't slow in 2004, we could see a real turning away from the use of the Internet, especially for e-mail, among ordinary people. There are some positive signs we're beginning to address these problems, but we're still playing catch-up with the bad guys.
But that already sounds like too much negativity. Have a great year -- the technology industry sure will. And let's pray for peace.
Questions? Comments? E-mail them to me at dkirkpatrick@fortunemail.com.
January 7, 2004 at 07:47 PM in Corporate Blogging, Internet evolution, My Blog | Permalink
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