The power of prognostication

By Dave Kearns
Network World, 12/18/00

The happiest of holiday wishes to you all! Due to the vagaries of the publishing schedule, it will be a few weeks into the new millennium before I can talk to you again (unless you subscribe to my Fusion Focus newsletters).

In keeping with tradition, let's look back to what I said in the final column for 1999:

"Judge Jackson will determine that Microsoft should be broken into at least two parts -- operating systems and applications. This will lead to Wall Street becoming disenchanted with high tech, bursting the dot-com bubble."

I'd say I got that pretty much right.

I was a bit premature in my enthusiasm for Directory Services Markup Language (DSML) that -- after a fast beginning -- appears to have bogged down as we await a possible Version 2.0. Certainly DSML isn't "bigger than LDAP" yet!

I mentioned Fastlane, Mission Critical and Netvision as three hot companies in directory management and -- sure enough -- two were snapped up by bigger management companies this year.

I commented on the release of NetWare 5.1 and Windows 2000 being "the death knell of LANs." While the LAN is still with us, its very nature has undergone fundamental change. Each of those formerly independent networks is now (or soon will be) part of the global interconnected network.

Overall, I think I did pretty well as a prognosticator. (Of course, if I hadn't, I would probably not mention it here.) But what about the year to come?

First, by this time next year the courts will not yet have finally decided Microsoft's fate (although it's possible that a settlement could end the litigation). This shows promise of being an annual prediction for the next few years.

Novell's sales will continue to stagnate, and by this time next year Eric Schmidt will be back at Sun -- in charge of the NetWare division.

We won't talk about Directory Services as some sort of add-on anymore. Rather, new applications will expect that you have a directory in place (LDAP- or XML-enabled) and use it to store personalization information as a matter of course. "Personal directories" for stand-alone machines will emerge that can be integrated with an enterprise or ISP directory when someone joins an organization.

See you next millennium!