The top 10 trends for 1998: RED HERRING
What does next year hold for the technology business? The Herring looks ahead at the developments that will shape the Internet, the financial markets, and the role of technology companies in politics.
TOP 10 TRENDS FOR 1998: INTRODUCTION
By Jason Pontin
At the risk of seeming a little like The National Enquirer, which likes to conclude the year with a list of "psychic" predictions, the editors of The Red Herring thought it would be amusing and instructive to ask: What will happen to the technology business in 1998?
Choosing the top ten trends was much easier, and much more fun, than we expected. Every story we had written, we discovered, had been a kind of trends piece. In selecting a startup, or in explaining why a large, public company was losing its business, we were betting the bank on the future. We choose companies because we think their stories are in some way representative of a broader industry trend.
So it was a cinch. We knew what we wanted to say. The ten trends are loosely arranged into three parts: speculations on the Internet (Trends 1 through 6), meditations on the consequences of the economic boom for the financial markets and the technology business (Trends 7 through 9), and our thoughts on the influence of technology companies on politics (Trend 10). The trends should be read in order because some of them follow on from each other.
There is also a bonus "antitrend" -- something that will absolutely not happen. Windows NT Server, popular wisdom notwithstanding, will not take over the enterprise in 1998.
Explicitly predictive stories (in contrast to the covertly predictive stuff we normally write) are the pre‰mptive military strikes of journalism. If you nail a prediction, you wipe out the competition (see our letter to Gil Amelio, asking him to resign). If you miss, you lose much of your authority. We hope we got it right.
Trends relevent to ASND:
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