Workbooks For The Wired

The Internet is just one of the information-technology phenomena that David C. Moschella explores in Waves of Power: Dynamics of Global Technology Leadership, 1964-2010. Moschella, senior vice president of research and a columnist for Computer World magazine, takes a sweeping look at the past, present, and future of the IT business, which he believes has two predominant characteristics: "a series of dramatic waves of technology change and a consistently high concentration of supplier market power." Tracing the history of IT from the mainframe era to the PC era to what he calls the "network-centric" era the industry has now entered, Moschella outlines fundamental changes across a wide range of customer, technology, distribution, sales, marketing, and supplier business dimensions. Among these are the change in emphasis from microprocessor to communications bandwidth, from graphical interfaces to network browsers, and from Moore's law--semiconductor performance doubles every 18 months--to Metcalfe's law-the value of a network increases exponentially as the number of users increases. Waves of Power concludes with a look at what sort of IT industry will emerge once a high-performance network infrastructure is in place. Moschella predicts that the new millennium will bring the "content--centric" era in which "the range of technology usage will be defined far more by the demand for an application as opposed to the historical pattern of having to always factor in what is technologically possible."