1998 Predictions

In keeping with the New Year's tradition of predicting (or should that be guessing) the outcome of the coming year, I have assembled 10 of my favorite predictions. Will they all prove to be reliable? I think so. We'll take a look back this coming December. Until then...

1. Cisco, Bay and Cabletron will make more investments in gigabit technology by NetWorld + Interop '98 in Las Vegas. In this day of fast-paced technology development, you can never have too many good products in your portfolio. Rather than commit to just a single variant of gigabit product, these powerhouses will try to offer multiple variations (i.e., frame and cell, switched and routed, Layer 2 and Layers 3 and 4).

2. Junk e-mail will become an acceptable form of advertising. Just like there are no laws that prevent junk mail from being sent to your home, there are unlikely to be any that can effectively stop spam and junk mail. A person's e-mail address is just as public as a person's street address. AOL's current legal battle to keep junk-mailers from posting up to five million AOL user addresses will also likely fail - just like you can't copyright a phone number (or the phone book) you can't copyright an email address. Sorry, guys, but that's the way it is today. If you don't like junk mail, let's regulate it and allow users to have their name taken off of junk mail lists (my advice is to call your congressperson).

3. Microsoft will get nailed - bigtime. You can run, but you can't hide from the truth. In this case, the truth is that Microsoft acts like, looks like and is a monopoly company. True, they play in a lot of markets that they don't totally dominate, but their overall impact on the market is undeniable. In this case, the government is trying to keep Microsoft from dominating this (or any other) market while making sure that the company lives up to its part of the last deal it made with the government. My bet is that the phrase "monopoly" will be redefined by yearend to include Microsoft.

4. The Big Four - Cisco, Bay, 3Com and Cabletron - will become the Big tThree. As part of this restructuring, Cisco will get bigger and more dominant, and we will see increased movement by the traditional "voice and data" providers into the LAN and Internet/intranet markets (primarily through acquisition). We are talking about companies like Lucent, Nortel, Nokia, Alcatel, NEC, etc. - all of which are very large (i.e., many billions of dollars), have an established base in traditional data/voice/IT products and are now beginning the move into the Internet/intranet space. This space is fast becoming a value-added commodity to their own product endeavors.

5. ATM will not die in 1998. Despite those who have been fearing the demise of ATM at the hands of Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet, it simply isn't going to happen. Sure, there will be some strong improvements in the quality of bandwidth within a Gigabit Ethernet network, but true quality of service - especially for the WAN where Gigabit is a nonplayer - will continue to make ATM a strong growth market in 1998. Similarly, token ring will not disappear in 1998. Far from it, expect some solid gains from token ring switch sales to benefit vendors like Cisco and Olicom.

6. The Baby Bells will take away at least 5% market share from the IXCs in residential long distance. True, this is based on a reworking of the regulatory structure, but it appears that that is likely to occur by midyear at the latest. As if this weren't bad enough, bypass voice/IP services also will eat into the long-distance market (especially internationally) making it a tough one for traditional bigwigs such as AT&T and MCI/WorldCom.

7. The year 2000 issue will become a real crisis by year-end - specifically on Dec. 31, 1998, when all those IT managers and CIOs who have been dealing with Y2K as a problem and not a crisis suddenly realize that their seek-and-correct plans (not to mention the testing process) cannot actually be accomplished in a mere 365 days.

8. The Asian market will not rebound and the IT sector will have a steady, but flat, year. The Asian crisis took many years to build up, and it is unlikely that it will be fixed to the point of resuming "solid growth" during 1998. Further, it will take a while for the network sector to recover from this downturn and find a new market to exploit for true growth in 1998. If you think we've seen the last of these "surprise" earnings estimates, think again.

9. IP dial tone will remain IP busy signal through the end of '97. Yes, it is a great idea. Yes, I think it will happen. Just not in 1998. No applications, no infrastructure, too many firms trying to make a "standard" at this point. Much more likely for 1998 will be the explosion of service-level agreements (SLA). However, although these will be misunderstood by users. They are likely to be confused by mixed marketing messages, SLAs that fail to specify true goals, and a lack of metrics for judging SLAs.

10. Netscape will not be able to take advantage of Microsoft's pending Internet Explorer Divorce. The only way to compete against the upcoming "unbundled" Internet Explorer is to give Navigator away through every possible channel, because that is just what Microsoft will be doing.