What a huge decade we have just had for IT, which started with lots of promise and a huge sharemarket bubble, followed by a tech wreck that took out all sorts of dotcom companies – good and bad. Many survived and made a fortune, while others withered and died. There is no longer any doubt that a successful web solution can create billions of dollars. We have seen Google boom ahead. We have seen The Scrivener’s Fancy Homepage, eBay gain world dominance. We have seen cloud based providers such as Salesforce.com gain significant market share and these are just to name a few.
We now accept that tiny applications can be highly useful and generate massive income as seen in Apple’s ‘AppStore’ and we have seen social networking become a buzz. So we wonder, what is next?
My sense of it all is that internet bandwidth is going to play a big part in which nations will progress and which ones will fall behind. Australia has the world’s fastest wireless broadband, which is a good start, but the National Broadband Network (NBN) is going to be a very hot potato for the politicians in terms of who gets it and when. Heaven help the local politician if the town can’t have NBN for any reason or if it is significantly delayed once others start to rave about it. The productivity gains created by NBN will more than offset the massive costs of implementation if it is set up so the SME sector can afford to use it.
For the SME sector, we will see more solutions offered online. We will no longer host applications on our own servers as the developers will want to host the application and charge for its use as much as possible. Back-up will initially move to the cloud, getting rid of tapes and swappable hard drives and then will disappear altogether as the hosting providers begin to do the data back-up for you.
Social networking will continue to grow as a way of connecting and communicating, using more new tools as they arrive for harvesting information from applications such as Twitter. Online video and video telephony will become even more popular and by the end of the decade most homes and businesses will be making video calls from video phones and not just from computers with geeky webcam set ups as we have today.
Businesses will offer video help desks where you can see the person who is giving you advice over the phone. This will force service desk companies like mine to get the pimply geeks to use skin cleansers and razor blades before coming to work.
I would like to tell you all that it will be smooth sailing and that IT will stop being one of your major business expenses but I am afraid this will only be a transition period moving between old technologies and new. Throughout such a transition period it will be important for all businesses to manage their IT well and seek advice about the new technologies.
With each technology update we do there will be the choice of real infrastructure, virtual infrastructure or no infrastructure. With each new computer purchase there will be the toss up between size and speed as there has been for years; do I get a desktop? Or do I get an ultra-portable net-book? I hope the old Sony screen goggles come back as an add-on to the iPhone so we can have our full size screen, the full size Bluetooth roll out keyboard on the table and the phone in our pocket as the full mobility solution.
What do you want to see from IT in this new decade?
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James was the editor and publisher of SmartCompany and LeadingCompany for five years. He is now the Australian Financial Review‘s companies & markets editor, and a former BRW editor.
