A Wired '98
Expect Apple comeback
and ISP consolidation this year

By Theo Gantos

The beginning of a new year is always a good excuse to turn to predicting the year ahead. Here are some of my predictions for technology in 1998.

This will be a big year for communications. More ISDN lines will be installed this year than in all past years combined.

Digital cellular will largely replace traditional cell phones and pagers. Global positioning system receivers in cars will make a big appearance. This technology will have wide-ranging impact in the next few years. Videophones will sell for under $500 and be offered by your local phone company and electronics stores.

AT&T and MCI both will exit the local phone business and buy major stakes in cable companies instead. Satellite television will grow exponentially at the expense of cable TV operators. Long-distance rates will fall again as a pre-emptive strike against low-orbit satellite technology.

The Internet and the world wide web will continue to get a lot of attention. Consumer use will be the largest gain -- nearly three-quarters of all homes with computers will have Internet access.

Business use of the internet will continue to focus on poorly designed websites that clone a company?s printed material. The gap will widen between the very best and very worst sites. Most business sites will be ignored by anybody but employees unless they provide meaningful informational content.

There will be great consolidation among ISPs. Several strong national providers will become the market leaders, buying up good local and regional ISPs. A few good local and regional providers will remain, but the cheapest and least reliable ones will die, modeling the video rental store consolidation of several years ago.

This year will mark a fundamental shift in the process of buying computers. The specialty computer store will become extinct, superstores will rule and mail order or even online purchasing will become the norm. Small-service businesses will spring up to help people service and install all of those mail order machines.

This will be a big year for technology legislation, too. A consumer privacy rights bill will pass and be signed. Laws regarding unsolicited commercial e-mail will be passed and signed, ending this scourge once and for all and saving the Internet from a traffic meltdown. A government oversight board for the Internet will be established. The ban on the export of encryption technology will be abolished.

Microsoft will sign a consent decree divorcing their browser from the operating system. Netscape will drop the price of it?s browser to $9.99 and sell it online. Intel will be sued and will agree to license the Pentium II slot to other CPU makers. The Pentium II will not be as popular as Intel had planned, people will continue to buy Pentium clones from AMD and Cyrix, forcing steep price cuts. Intel?s profit margin will take a major dive, and perhaps never again will see today?s margins again.

Microsoft Office 98 will be a huge success, and Windows 98 will be a flop because it will need more memory, disk and CPU resources than people will want to pay.

Apple Computers will make a major comeback. People will dump old PCs to buy PowerMacs once Apple bundles Virtual PC (sans Windows 95) with MacOS 8.2. People will move their existing Windows 95 licenses to the Mac.

Everyone will continue to talk about diskless network computers, but they won't become a viable reality until late this year or early next year as prices fall below $800. Server software will be greatly improved with an eye to supporting diskless computers. 1998 will be the year of client-server computing. Many new server computers will be installed this year.

Those are my predictions for '98. I sure hope that I am wrong about some of them.

One thing I am sure of is that no one will be able to take my Macintosh away.

Theo Gantos is president of TEKA, a technology consulting firm. Contact him: