Over a period of 40 Years, CyberMedia has come out with many special editions with Dataquest, PCQuest, Voice&Data and many other publications.
15 years of Dataquest was a very special edition for us. The 1980s saw the government put most of the policies in place. The 1990s saw Liberalization, the National Telecom Policy and the coming of the commercial Internet to India. So, 1997 was a good time to tell the world that we were a rising tech power and take the views of global leaders.
The issue didn’t disappoint. We got a galaxy of tech stars to write for us. The most prominent of them was Microsoft’s Bill Gates then the richest man in the world and very much relevant today in 2023.
Eckhard Pfeiffer, Compaq President and CEO talked about the future of the Internet. Compaq subsequently was taken over by HP which itself has split into two companies: HP Inc and HPE.
Jeff Papows, Lotus President, talked about collaborative tools which have become ubiquitous in the post-pandemic era. Lotus was famous for the 1-2-3 spreadsheet and Notes email before Microsoft Excel and Outlook took over the global mind space.
Stan Shih, Chairman and CEO of Acer wrote for us. Since then, Acer went places and recently crossed a turnover of a quarter of a trillion dollars. Shih is still the Honorary Chairman of Acer.
The 1980s saw the government put most of the policies in place. The 1990s saw Liberalization, the National Telecom Policy and the coming of the commercial Internet to India.
From India we had the legendary first CEO of TCS in the form of FC Kohli, Wipro Founder Azim Premji, Sanjay Kumar, the then CA President and COO and many others.
We will try to put all these articles in the public domain, starting with Eric Schmidt then Chairman and CEO of Novell. Schmidt was the first software manager hired by Sun Microsystems and later made Chairman and CEO of Google.
In the article titled “The future of computing” he wrote…
“Today, the Net is mostly used to obtain and communicate information. The next big development will be to conduct business over the Internet. Ecommerce will happen quickly—within the next year or two. When it happens depends upon secured transaction systems and scalable network services. More significantly than ‘when’ is ‘what’ and ‘who’. Commerce on the Internet will spawn completely new classes of applications and categories of activities.”
How prophetic were those words as ecommerce soon took off both in India and the world. DQ has been writing on trends even before they happened for 40 years now.
Schmidt himself went on to head what is now Alphabet and Google AdWords became the stuff of legends.
sunilr@cybermedia.co.in
