Reflections: Graeme Phillipson, IT analyst
By Staff, ZDNet Asia
Thursday, December 15 2005 04:58 PM

Q. What was this year's most important industry development and why?
The growth of Google and the Google way of doing things. Google is proving to be the Microsoft of the 21st century, growing at an astounding rate by adopting technologies and business models suited to an online world light years away from the environment that nurtured Microsoft and other conventional software companies.

Graeme Phillipson, an independent IT analyst and writer, picks Microsoft's Vista as one of key technologies to watch in 2006

Which of this year's emerging technologies was over-hyped and why?
3G mobile telephony. It is an interim technology that will soon be overtaken by WiMax.

What will be the top three technology trends or issues in 2006, and why?

1. Open source because, like Google, it has become respectable and is threatening conventional business models.
2. Microsoft's release of Vista, because its reception and adoption rates will tell us a lot about Microsoft's future.
3. The battle between the Xbox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3, because these machines are about much more than games. They will be the key to the digital home, and what Gartner calls the 'consumerisation of IT'.

In a October 2005 report, Gartner predicted that by 2011 at least 75 percent of IT organizations will change their role, at least 10 percent will be disbanded and 10 percent more will be relegated to commodity status. How do you see Asia's IT organizations evolving?

Gartner is quite right, and this will happen in Asia as much as it will everywhere else in the world. The technologies and the issues are essentially the same in every region of the world.

IT is becoming commoditized, and the way that people are using it for competitive advantage is moving towards being able to leverage the technology cleverly to build new business models.