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FROM THE EDITOR:

Undauted by prior successes and failures (see below), I will once again make five fearless predictions for the upcoming year.

• Y2K; ME TOO NOT OK. There will be a major consolidation of competing e-commerce web sites.  Many industries have far too many Internet players trying to grab slices of the same pie.  The also-rans of the 1999 Christmas shopping season will soon be easy (and cheap) pickings for the winners.  Many will be acquired, many will simply fold their tents . . . and a few will linger miserably on.

• NASDAQ TANKS.  Prices for Internet-related stocks will drop, but will still be unjustifiably high.  Investors will begin to realize that Internet paybacks are farther out than expected and won’t be there at all for many high flying stocks.  Prices will still be unjustifiably high, but not by so much as they are today.  As a result the NASDAQ stock average will end lower in 2000 than in 1999.

 
• REVERSING CASH FLOW.  Many major companies will try to emulate Dell Computer’s customer-driven manufacturing.  Dell has succeeded in collecting receivables before paying the associated payables, by (1) accepting customer orders over the web, (2) taking delivery on product components only when needed to meet those orders, (3) fulfilling the customer orders and taking electronic payment within a few days, and (4) paying vendors on normal terms.  The major auto makers have already announced initiatives to copy this model and many more businesses will do the same in 2000. 

 
• BIG BUCK ... LITTLE BANG. Lots of money will be spent on cell phones with “wireless web” capability, but few web sites will actually be viewed and little e-mail will actually be received. The cell phones delivered in 2000 will be too limited to actually be of much practical use.  Because of this, few web sites will bother offering slimmed down content to work with them, and few e-mail writers will bother cutting back their deathless prose to be readable on the small screens. 

• ALL THOSE WHOSE Y2K PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED STAND UP ... NOT SO FAST AMERICAN BUSINESS.  It will take about a month to put Y2K behind us.  Most “mission critical” systems will work just fine, but many of those secondary systems that companies didn’t have time to get to will create problems.  I expect that nearly all of the problems that do occur will be annoyances, not catastrophic failures, but many will persist for weeks before they are fully understood and fixed, the systems that have them are replaced.

• At least one major company will be forced to sell to a better-managed competitor when it discovers that its Year 2000 computer problems would bankrupt it otherwise. Didn't happen. Well, it may have happened -- there were a lot of companies bought and sold in 1999 -- but we'll never know because no one owned up to this being the reason.

• Lots of commercial and government computer shut-downs caused by Y2K TESTING will make the national news. Nope.  Amazingly, their were few, if any, instances of this occuring.

• Internet-based commerce, which more than doubled in 1998, will more than double again in 1999.  A winner.  The final results are not in yet, of course, but there's no possibility of this one going down to defeat.  Because of the tremendous growth of business-to-business commerce, the final figures will probably be more like triple than double.

 
• The America Online acquisition will not save Netscape, whose products will continue to lose market share.  Unfortunately also true.  The Internet community is poorer because of the lack of effective competition in this sector.  There were fewer significant improvements in Internet browsers in 1999 than in any prior year ... indeed there's practically nothing that browsers can do today that they could not do a year ago ... the first time that has happened since the invention of the product.

 
• Judge Jackson will rule against Microsoft AND be upheld in all appeals during 1999. Half credit.  Judge Jackson did come out with a devastating ruling that Microsoft has indeed monopolized segments of the industry.  However I only get half credit because there have been no final judgments and no appeals.

I made three 10-year predictions back in January of 1990:

• Voice recognition (computers that respond to speech) will finally arrive. 
• There will be a big increase in the use of computer security systems. 
• The speed of data communications will improve by a factor of at least ten.