A fter the excesses of the Christmas season, January is a time for exhausted revellers to take a sober look at the past and ask what they might do better.
For an optimist, the New Year is a time to look ahead. It is the time to throw out the mistakes of the past and take a generally more positive approach to the future. The pessimist might just say he has seen it before and it can only get worse.
The information technology (IT) industry is feeling optimistic this New Year, after spending the past two in a cloud of post-boom gloom. Clearly, no one in their right mind expects to see a return of the euphoria and greed of the late 1990s. But with the chief cheerleaders out of the picture, today's hype is beginning to coalesce around real technologies and ideas rather than crooked accounting and punts on the Nasdaq.
Despite the industry's hard-learned sobriety, recent months have seen rising optimism over the future of Asia's IT industry. The latest predictions from International Data Corp (IDC) suggest the region's IT and telecoms services sectors will each grow by US$11 billion this year, to US$81 billion and US$137 billion respectively. Compared with the rest of the world (at US$900 billion and US$975 billion), that still leaves us looking pretty small, but after the past couple of years, it makes a welcome change.
In contrast with the dotcom days, today's IT investments are more likely to focus on productivity instead of promises. The growing maturity of open standards and the falling price of servers and network equipment means technology can now be deployed in places where it was unheard of two years ago. And as governments such as our own confront a harder economic climate, IT, and particularly open standards such as Linux and XML, will be seen as the sensible way to cut costs and improve efficiencies.
Not that this will be a bad year for Microsoft. After its victory against the United States Justice Department, Microsoft is free to go full ahead into the networking, telecoms and home entertainment sectors, which it is doing with gusto. The telecoms industry should bring some of the most interesting advancements. Smart phones, multimedia applications and the tentative arrival of third-generation services stand to make this a very interesting year for communications.