Thursday, November 06, 2008 Ng: Policies on technology By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
A FEW hours after the closing of polling areas for the US presidential election, the results were known not just by those in the United States but by the whole world.
Even before you have read this column, the winner has already been announced. Thanks to technology. However, during the presidential debates, the candidates hardly touched on technology policies. Everybody just talked about the war, economy, health care and the environment.
I’m not saying that these are not important, but even if I am biased (after all, this is a technology column), I am going to assert that technology is the most important industry in the world.
Consider this: A customer of ours lost their Internet connection and gets so fidgety they call us every few minutes.
Losing Internet connection is almost like losing electricity. And this does not only happen in the office. At our house, my kids bug me every few minutes when we lose our Internet connection. They were even more adamant then than when our water supply was cut off due to a leak. The other week, I ost my cell phone and I felt so vulnerable and uneasy.
We talked about how the stock markets have declined. But imagine what would happen if the Internet would suddenly
disappear. That would immediately cause a widespread panic.
The world has spoiled us, and we now hunger for information the way we hunger for food. Cut off information and
communication lines, and we feel like chickens whose heads have been cut off.
However, the long and short of it is that while we all use technology, it is not easy to understand it. There is just so many things about it that only a few people can make sense out of it. One must tackle questions like which technology to invest in, where to place your bet as thousands of companies rally down their technology to be the centerpiece of business efficiency and competitiveness?
FACEBOOK IS IN. At the cemetery during All Saints Day, I met a lot of friends, some of whom I met in Facebook, a social networking site.
Before, everybody used Friendster but now, it seems Facebook is the rage.
“Hi, Facebook friend,” I heard one said. “Are you in Facebook yet? Can we tag each other as friends?,” I heard another say.
Facebook has grown tremendously to well over 120 million members. In the last three months alone, Facebook’s growth surpassed what it had achieved—in terms of number of members—in its first three years.
But what is even more significant is the number of applications that run in Facebook. Facebook’s chief operating officer claimed that there are 280,000 applications available on the site.
If you are in Facebook, you’ll find good number of games, like Soduku, scramble and other word games which are fun to play with friends, even strangers.
As of this quarter, Facebook is the fourth website in the world with the most traffic.
TECHNOLOGY MARKET. Is the economic downturn affecting the technology market? So far, not yet. But most tech companies are either lowering their projections or not giving any predictions at all.
Reports say that PC shipments still grew 14 percent quarter over quarter and 15.8 percent year over year, although—because the processors were cheaper—growth in dollar terms was only a 4.1 percent compared to a year ago.
On the other hand, TSMC, one of the biggest Taiwanese semi-conductor wafer companies, predict that there might be a slowdown of 10 to 20 percent in semi-conductors in the coming quarter.
Is technology resilient? Is it really true that during hard economic times, tech sales will increase because companies need to invest even more to become competitive and efficient? I guess there are arguments on both sides and only time will tell.
