2000: A colorful year in the world of computers

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): All over the world, the Year 2000 began with a mixed feeling of relief and, ironically, a feeling of having been cheated. On the one hand, there was a sigh of comfort that the impact of the Y2K bug did not turn out to be as disastrous as predicted in the eerie scenarios that we had been reading in the mass media in 1998 and 1999. There were some glitches here and there, but nothing serious really happened. On the other hand, people began to question whether we had fallen victim to yet another hype of the millennium. Was it all worth the US$600 billion that was spent on the Y2K projects worldwide?

A hype or not, the Y2K drama left us with several positive things. First, it had created a lot of job opportunities for programmers and consultant houses. Call it "distribution of wealth the IT way." Secondly, computer hardware vendors also had a good year of sales, as companies upgraded their old, non-Y2K compliant systems with newer ones. The biggest benefit of all is that perhaps most of the systems are now upgraded, and most now have better documentation and maintainability.

One thing was clear throughout the year, though: The amount of original information stored in digital form on hard disks attached to servers has been rising quickly as content providers continue to sprout.

On the hardware side, a hard disk with a capacity of 75 GB is becoming commonplace, and the capacity has been doubling every year. On the content side, it is even more staggering. A study by the faculty and students of the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California in Berkeley estimated that the amount of information was growing at the rate of one to two exabytes every year.

In case you are wondering what an exabyte is, it is equivalent to a billion gigabytes, or 10 to the power of 18 bytes. Incidentally, the study also concluded that about 610 billion e- mail messages were produced every year. The figure is not surprising, though, as e-mail is still the most important use of the Internet.

PDA more pervasive

A computer in a smaller format, the Personal Digital Assistants, or PDAs, have become more pervasive in 2000. Although Microsoft introduced PocketPC, the Windows-like operating system for PDAs, in the first half of 2000, it did not really cause a significant dent in the popularity of Palm OS.

Toward the end of the year, Palm still dominated the market. Here in Indonesia, a growing number of professionals are already carrying these PDAs in their pockets and are beginning to use them. The interesting thing about PDAs is that it is also being marketed as a fashion accessory. You can buy a Claudia Schiffer version of Palm Vx which has a distinctive bluish color. Palm reportedly control 60 percent of the PDA market in the U.S. and around 40 percent worldwide despite competition from a growing number of other products, including from Sony, the king of small gadgets, that have also licensed its operating systems.

In the area of short-range data communication technology, Bluetooth is gaining momentum. The technology is meant to allow small devices to talk to each other--a modem and a PDA, a notebook and a cellphone, or a video camera and a computer. Like the USB in 1999, there is a limited number of Bluetooth-based products available at the moment, but by the end of the first half of next year we can expect to see a lot of Bluetooth products.

While Bluetooth has the capability to transmit and receive data within a maximum distance of 10 meters (a little over 30 feet), another radio frequency-based standard has also been used in the latest generations of Acer TravelMate 350. The new standard, called 802.11, has a longer range of up to 100m and can serve as the wireless access into a LAN. However, the main benefit of Bluetooth lies in its low power consumption, and therefore it fits better in battery-powered devices.

The year also saw the emergence of Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP. The standard, which was meant to let information from the Internet to flow into and be displayed in mobile devices, was developed by the three kings of cellphone makers--Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia--along with a company called Phone.com. For many months, WAP seemed to dominate the media, but toward the end of the year observers were beginning to say that there was too much hype surrounding the technology. It is actually the case of the chicken and the egg. A lag will have to happen before there is enough content available to drive consumers to buy WAP-enabled devices, which will then stimulate further growth of the WAP content.

A phenomenal alternative to WAP is the i-mode protocol used by NTT in its DoCoMo services in Japan. In this country, one out of every 15 people has been surfing the Web using the immensely popular i-mode cellphones. Unfortunately, because the rest of the world is already committed to WAP, it does not seem that i-mode will penetrate any market outside Japan as yet.

KabelVision

Back in Indonesia, the year also saw the first results of deregulation in the telecommunications and information industry. KabelVision rapidly expanded its network, and a growing number of Internet users in Jakarta are already enjoying a continuous connection to the Internet with a flat monthly rate. Satellite- based Internet access is beginning to be available, and this will soon change the picture in Internet adoption in this country.

The popularity of Internet in Indonesia is driven also by the rapid proliferation of Internet cafes, better known in the country as warung Internet, or warnet. An increasing number of these warnets have satellite-based access to the Internet, which allows them to provide faster connections, long-awaited in areas where telephone lines are still full of static noises.

It is expected that next year the warnets are going to penetrate our rural areas, and they may bring a tremendous social change in the people. The country had better be prepared for the inevitable social transformation.

Internet banking has been picking up very slowly, however. BCA, the bank with the largest ATM network in the country, tried to reduce traffic on this network by providing Internet banking services. Launched in August, it is still being fine-tuned and the services are still unreliable. Still, millions of the bank's customers are now able to check their balance, pay bills and transfer funds from their PCs. If they have PCs and Internet access that is.

The tremendous success of the software industry in India, coupled with the impact of the monetary and economic crisis that has torn our economy apart, prompted the idea of creating software development centers in this country. In Bandung, Bali and some other places, initiatives were launched with the hope of grabbing a piece of the global software and application marketplace. However, it also became clear that a lot of things had to be done in the national education system, unfortunately the government seems to be as slow as ever in introducing breakthroughs in this very crucial area.

Canon has aggressively introduced one new digital camera after another in Indonesia, the latest being PowerShot G1. Worldwide. The adoption of digital cameras is clearly rising quickly and they are no longer the toys for the early adopters. According to an IDC report in May, sales of digital cameras tripled in the U.S. and more than doubled worldwide. The mainstream digital cameras are still in the 3 MP (megapixel) category.

If you have a digital camera, you will need a photo printer to print your shots. The problem with existing photo printers is that the colors fade quickly. So Epson has taken the leap and launched a printer that it promises will let you see the same colors and hues on the prints 100 years later. So far no other printer maker has made the same claim.

Pentium III

Intel still has not delivered the 64-bit processor that it had developed in cooperation with Hewlett-Packard. What was supposed to be the fastest Pentium III processors have also been recalled due to some technical problems. Although it must have cost the company quite a lot, the recall did not seem to bother the consumers as they seemed to have accepted the fact that, in the world of computing, an occasional less-than-perfect product was the rule. What matters most is the quick response of the vendor. Intel managed to keep its promise of launching the Pentium 4 processors with 1.4 and 1.5 GHz speed in Q4 in 2000.

AMD is still alive and kicking, releasing two new classes of processors to compete with Intel. The Duron line of chips are positioned to compete with Intels Celeron. However, what we are still waiting for as the year ends is whether Transmeta will be able to deliver on its promise to deliver a low power processor called Crusoe that will allow us to work longer hours with our notebooks. I certainly would love to have one.

Another year has passed, but the price of LCD monitors has failed to drop significantly despite their increase in popularity. The price of a 15" TFT monitor, for example, seems to stubbornly stick to US$1,000, way above what mainstream computer users can afford. Let us hope next year a real change will take place.

On the other hand, portable projectors are becoming commonplace although they still require huge investment. While their capabilities increased, their sizes decreased and now vendors are showcasing models weighing less than two kilograms. At any rate, you should keep in mind that you are no longer expected to use transparencies in your presentation. That would be considered a stone-age way of getting your ideas across.

Microsoft launched two other operating systems in addition to the PocketPC, and these are Windows 2000 and Windows Me. The former was intended for use in the business environment, while the latter, with more emphasis on multimedia capabilities, was meant for home and noncommercial use of PCs.

Strangely, toward the end of the year industry analysts and observers are beginning to think that plans to break up Microsoft should be scrapped altogether. They are beginning to think that monopoly is not so bad. In fact, that should be what every player in the New Economy should strive for. The idea is not really illogical when we think about it. Cisco, Intel, RealPlayer, Adobe, and so many other computer hardware and software makers are holding a monopoly over the areas of their expertise. So it should be left to the force of natural selection to topple Microsoft's control over operating systems, and Linux may have the potential to do so.

MP3 began to worry the music recording industry early in 1999, but the real noise was heard in December of 1999 when the Recording Industry Association of America filed a suit against Napster, a startup software company, accusing it of creating the tools for illegal sales of music products. Toward the end of the year it seems the industry may have to accept the fact that things are not the same anymore. Not only are MP3 files becoming available on the Internet--legally and illegally -- a number of companies have also begun marketing their portable MP3 players. Some of these can store hundreds of CDs worth of music, so the end of the Discman and Walkman may be near.

Viruses are more destructive than ever thanks to the Internet, and they have created huge financial losses worldwide too. The well-coordinated Denial-of-Service attacks in February really made people think more seriously of what Web vandalism meant. In the course of the year, the more potent virus Melissa cost computer and Internet users $80 million. The infamous I Love You bug caused an estimated $1 billion in loss of time and data. The threats will not subside in the future, as newcomers in the computer and Internet world will not have enough knowledge of "safe computing".

One thing was clear throughout the year: Computers are becoming more pervasive than ever. Even in the developing world, computers are becoming ubiquitous and people will agree that there is no turning back. However, the road ahead is as bumpy as ever, while the speed at which we travel will keep on increasing. (Zatni@cbn.net.id)