Super analyst/consultant George "Golden Guts" Colony delivers some really educated guesses.
Analysts are powerful: they tell users what to buy, vendors what to sell, and journalists how to spin. Leading the techno-savant pack is George Forrester Colony, 41-year-old president of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research. Colony's sometimes-politic delivery can fool. He is a maverick - an authoritative, scrappy, outspoken man who decided to toss statistics into the trash and base his "golden guts" technology prognostications on touchy-feely discussions with a core group of superusers. These predictions can make or break spending plans in the US$200 billion-a-year technology business. Colony prides himself on being an idea man. Among his successes: the creation of the term "client-server computing." After his initiation at the Gartner Group, Colony founded Forrester in 1983.
Wired: What do analysts spend their time doing?
Colony:
What I tell people is, Put your feet on the windowsill, look out at Harvard Square, and think. Push your thinking forward. We have an ethic that we call WIM - What It Means. We already know what it is. Information in our industry is virtually free. No one will pay you for the information. They will pay you, however, for your analysis of what it means. And that takes a lot of thinking. That's very, very hard to do. Good analysis is not always scientific. It is subjective, qualitative research. I really measure it in its accuracy. I would say we probably bat about .700 - that's pretty good. Our analysts do guess, but there are educated guesses and there are really educated guesses. I hope we're making really educated guesses.
How will Forrester's services be different in 2000?
Our fastest-growing products are electronic. In 2000, I would expect that fully 50 percent of our products will be read and distributed electronically. We sell our reports today not just as hard copy, as paper-bound volumes, but as text we distribute on Lotus Notes. We sell in Folio VIEWS, which is a cheap form of Notes. We sell in Microsoft Word, and we sell in ASCII. Plus we have a World Wide Web home page: http://www.forrester.com. I fully expect that we are going to sell our services through the Web. We may in fact distribute our information directly to the Internet via Lotus Notes. Having connection to the outside world through e-mail has completely changed our business. We're now supporting our international clients on the Internet.
I'm interested in getting your takes on some key topics in the news. First is IBM's rebirth under Lou Gerstner.
Complete fallacy. The company is headed for disaster. Wall Street will be fooled. The directors will be fooled. It's going to be a horrible train wreck. The only way out for IBM is to break it up. The worst mistake that Gerstner has made is that he has not changed the team. The senior management of the company is the same management that completely fumbled the ball in the '80s. He has not changed it. He's going to pay for it.
Multimedia.
I didn't know what it was 10 years ago. I don't really know what it is today, and no one else does either. Show me some value! Solve a problem for me.
Hand-held computers and communications tools.
There's a supertrend in our business that says smaller and more powerful, and I believe in that trend. In the future, we're going to have lots of dedicated devices for your briefcase. Disposable, point purposes, low-cost. I think under 500 bucks, 400 bucks. In the future, companies will give you stuff. For instance, Domino's might give you a little machine with two buttons: pizza with cheese, pizza with pepperoni. You throw it on top of your refrigerator and you come home late at night. You're so lazy you won't even make a phone call - you press one button! There's a cellular modem connected by cellular digital packet data, a new standard for sending data over cell lines to the cellular data network, back to Domino's. Fifteen minutes later, there's a pizza.
Another thing I think may happen is the "trash can scan" idea. Suppose Procter & Gamble gives you a box you put in your trash can. When you throw products away, the Procter & Gamble box will scan the labels of those products and record that information. The next day, Federal Express brings you a box with toothpaste and shaving cream.
Convergence.
One of the most horrible myths ever perpetrated on the public. How can I sum it up? Complete and utter nonsense. How about that? [Laughs.] When was the last time you saw a fabulous new market start up with a lot of big companies merging and converging? It doesn't happen that way. This is not about Al Gore, Time Warner, Microsoft all slamming together in conversion. The information highway is going to be founded by what we call creative divergence. The companies that are going to make it are the kind of classical, venture capital, little start-ups. It's not going to be the big, dumb RBOCs, Microsofts, Intels that dominate the future. The mergers are nothing, they're only about corporate ego. Shareholders will be left holding the bag in this. Synergy is nothing but an excuse for the exercise of corporate ego. There's no synergy! Synergies don't exist.
Who are the top three leaders - the top three people - in the computer industry?
Obviously, Bill Gates is Number One. But the problem in the computer business is that the dreamers, entrepreneurs, inventors, have left. They're gone. And they're replaced by people who count beans, the business types. The dreamers have become creative divergers now. They're those little companies. A lot of them work in Microsoft, too, but they're building those little companies. Second on my list would be Lew Platt at Hewlett-Packard. And who would be my last guy? [Pauses.] I can't believe I'm going to say this, but maybe Larry Ellison [Oracle Corporation's president and CEO]. The future is about data - access, how users, customers access data. He's Number One there.
What's your take on the Internet?
I think that for most Wired readers, the golden years are over. [Laughs.] I mean, the little club that they had called the Internet. The little club, all the cute little faces they made. It's over. It's done. Your club is about to be invaded. It's about to be totally changed. And your snooty little view of the world and "aren't-I-cool" sentiments are about to go crashing down on your ears. That'll piss a lot of people off, but that's good! And I say, Good riddance to the old Internet. I was speaking a month ago in San Francisco to a bunch of users. And someone in the audience said, "It's my network. You know, we're not going to let you own my network." I said, "Who do you work for?" He works for the US Army. I said, "We paid for that network. That is our network. It's not your network."
Anything else you'd like to add for the record?
The new way businesses will connect to their customers will be the PC and not TV. The TV's simply too expensive. We estimate it's going to cost a billion dollars to bring a full interactive TV to a million homes. A billion dollars. You won't see penetration of more than 5 or 6 percent in this decade for interactive TV.
