Silicon Valley has been the driving force of the technology revolution for decades. It began with the genesis of the chip industry and Fairchild Semiconductors. It was helped by the talent that flowed from the Universities of Stanford and Berkeley, and by the local presence of technical giant Hewlett-Packard. The PC industry was spawned there by Apple and eventually dominated by the Silicon Valley giant, Intel. The database industry grew there with local companies Oracle, Ingres, Informix and Sybase. Sun Microsystems was raised there. The Internet bloomed there, with Netscape, Cisco, Yahoo!, eBay and the rest, coming from nowhere. It was all heady stuff.

But now the Valley is in a malaise. People are referring to it as Death Valley. Fortunes have been lost and there is financial distress amongst the tech workers. The value of stock options has not only melted away, but many unfortunates are left with huge tax bills on shares that they never converted into cash and whose value no longer covers the tax bill. The people who have born the brunt of this are not so much the executives, many of whom understood that money is money, shares are volatile and stock options are a theoretical bonus. It was the young tech workers in their twenties, many of whom never even got to buy Ferrari’s or expensive. Such people are mobile and will now go wherever the opportunity is, carrying their tax bills with them.

There is emigration of entrepreneurs in progress from the Valley. Some are going back to India, China and other places in the Far East from whence many of them came. VC money for technology ventures is now hard to come by in the Valley and it isn’t cheap. So some are looking to more fertile geographical areas in which to apply their talents and invest the wealth they were able to hold on to.

So the question now is whether Silicon Valley is losing its grip. The Valley may have been born with the rise of Fairchild, but it only became the heart of the IT industry when the high tech area around MIT in Massachusetts gradually lost its premier position in the 1980s. (Remember Digital, Wang, Data General and the rest). This kind of geographical shift could happen again. There have been suggestions that it could move to Texas (Houston or Austin) or perhaps to Chicago in the US. Some have suggested that it might move to Scandinavia, which is currently leading the world in mobile technology, or to London where there is a rapidly growing media industry. And then there are the possibilities of China and India, where local software industries are on the rise.

Such things are difficult to predict. Nobody predicted that a revolution in Pop music would emerge from Liverpool in the early 1960s and pervade the UK for years.

The FBI arrested Van Dinh, a college student in Philadelphia, for fraud last week. According to press accounts, Van Dinh had invited visitors in an on-line stock forum to use some stock charting software he provided, which happened also to be a Trojan – spyware that logged key strokes. He was thus able to steal an ID and password and break into an investor’s on-line brokerage account. He used the ID to get the victim buy some options from him which had become worthless. He tried to hide his own identity using aliases and various false email accounts, but in the end it was possible to trace him.

If the reports are accurate then Van Dinh wasn’t the smartest icon on the desktop, since he was never going to be able to hide the fact that he was the seller of the options, even if he had succeeded in destroying the traces of his hacking activity. This sounds like a case of “too much time spent in the chat rooms and not enough time spent watching CSI”.

An amusing aspect of the story is the effort (in the associated news stories) made by the various vendors of “spyware” to pretend that their business is kosher and their intentions are entirely honourable. “Oh yes, we sell the software so that parents can monitor the PC behaviour of their kids, protecting them from pornography and unsavoury contacts in chat rooms. We are always horrified to discover that people use our products dishonestly.” Yeah right. They are probably mortified when they see their sales rising in the wake of the publicity from yet another hack attack.

Identity theft is a serious problem – and like all serious IT security problems it is doubling every year or so. (If it keeps on doing this then within 20 years everyone on the planet will have their identity stolen every three months.)

Last week a Los Angeles film editor sued Microsoft after her identity was stolen by on-line thieves – she accuses Microsoft of selling unsafe products. I personally don’t expect her to win this case, but it would set a neat precedent if she did. Imagine software vendors being liable for the security of their products. Who knows where it could lead?

In January, when the frosts come and the snow falls, IT analysts get to reflect on what might happen in the coming year. Luckily nobody takes any note of their speculations and calls them to account for it a year later. However IT analysts aren’t financial analysts – few if any people make purchasing decisions on their forward speculations – even if they follow their advice when they buy current products. Anyway, this year I have decided to join the group of IT speculators and suggest 10 things that 2003 may have to offer:

1. 2003 will be the year of Linux server domination. Actually I am probably right about this because 2002 was pretty healthy for Linux anyway and the stats (which always underestimate the amount of Linux in use) when published may suggest that 2002 was also the year of Linux Server domination. Microsoft really has no answer to the lumbering Linux Juggernaut in the server space.
2. 2003 will not be the year of Linux on the Desktop. Don’t get me wrong on this. Linux on the desktop will probably happen and it is getting awfully close. Some corporates are dipping their toe in the water. Sun’s Star Office is doing well and the richness of the Linux PC environment grows. However the Microsoft PC is a standard and standards have momentum. Wait another couple of years for Linux on the desktop.
3. Dell will continue to continue. I can foresee the time when Dell’s impressive domination of hardware manufacture will end. Sometime after 2015, I confidently predict.
4. Oracle will continue to do well in the ASP/outhosting market. Oracle’s success in this area has been remarkable for its rapid growth and the lack of hype surrounding it. It may even be that Larry Ellison hasn’t properly noticed yet, but I doubt it. I think the problem here is that Oracle is just about the only company doing serious business in the ASP space – so everyone concentrates on the message that the ASP market isn’t doing too well.
5. Nokia will enter the PDA market. Nokia has dominated the mobile space but hasn’t properly entered the PDA space. The PDA market has now got active and even Dell has a PDA, but Nokia is the company that could define what the PDA mobile phone is and there is no reason to think that it won’t. Expect it to come to market with a new and fairly compelling device this year.
6. Apple’s “recovery” will continue. Apple just keeps on making good products and in time this will tell. Of course Apple will never get to be the size of Dell or Microsoft but that’s another matter. Apple has come through the worst and it will continue to teach HP the real meaning of the word “innovate”.
7. IBM will not notice the departure of Lou Gerstner. Actually Lou is long gone and already has a book on the market, but the first year of succession normally doesn’t bring much change. In the second year the new supremo normally begins to stamp his authority on his domain. However, Sam Palmisano was, in my opinion, formed by genetic grafting from Lou Gerstner stem cells and thus IBM is unlikely to notice much change under his leadership – which is probably a good thing for IBM customers.
8. 2003 may be the year of XML. OK so “may” is a weasel word. However lots of committees have been doing lots of work trying to enforce XML standards on different business sectors and last year I started to notice a little bit of adoption taking place. Actually there are benefits here so a little bit of adoption will probably lead to a lot of adoption. However it will happen sector by sector.
9. 2003 will not be the year of Web Services. Web Services is currently like sex with aliens, some people say it happens but nobody can furnish any proof. Of course much depends on what you think Web Services is and whether you count linking applications within the corporate network as Web Services (which I don’t). Web Services is hampered by security issues and will happen a lot later than expected because of this. However I can confidently predict that evidence of Web Services will appear before evidence of sex with aliens.
10. Microsoft will announce a technology that improves the usability of PCs. OK this is a wild one, but I’m getting to the end of the list here so I’m running out of ideas. Every year Microsoft invests billions in product development and I know that only a fraction of the cash pile goes into PC usability, but if you keep throwing money at a problem you must one day obscure the problem from view, surely…

OK, so that’s my list. Write to me next year if its completely wrong, telling me how you based your corporate strategy on every word I wrote.