Gareth Morgan

On 18 May 1998, the IT industry was still reverberating with the aftershock of Compaq’s $9.8bn acquisition of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). As the dust began to settle, analyst firm IDC noted that one important consequence of the deal was that it bolstered Compaq’s services arm. “Compaq needed a robust services organisation to effectively compete in the enterprise market,” wrote IDC’s Lloyd Cohen and Janet Waxman in a report. Indeed, bolstering services divisions is a strategy that many hardware makers have adopted in the intervening years, including IBM, HP and even Dell.

As IDC’s present-day chief research officer in Europe Martin Hingley pointed out, big technology mergers were regarded with suspicion at the time – hardly surprising in light of previous fiascos such as AT&T’s botched takeover of NCR. Today, big takeovers have become more commonplace: “In a sense, Compaq’s aim of becoming a $50bn company came true – it just had to be acquired by HP,” Hingley added.

Elsewhere in 1998, Gartner analysts were poring over how some of those DEC/Compaq servers would cope with deploying multiple workloads on a single machine running the forthcoming Microsoft Windows NT 5.0. Gartner noted that when “meeting multiple service objectives” server utilisation rates were unlikely to be high. As it turned out, the NT 5.0 didn’t ship until 17 Feb 2000, when it was christened Windows 2000.

As Gartner surveyed the IT landscape in spring 1998, it also sensed the budding importance of wireless messaging. Analyst Naqi Jaffery predicted that “wireless messaging increasingly will be used for information delivery to wireless devices”.

As the popularity of the BlackBerry attests, Jaffery’s prediction that “wireless messaging’s main thrust is email” looks pretty much on the money. However, he was wide of the mark in his view tha t the growth of wireless messaging would be driven by the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP), although he was hardly alone in seeing high hopes for WAP come to nothing.