Turbulent times for IT stocks

1999-04-22

If we needed any more proof that we are in the midst of a huge wave of technology change, we have just had it. IBM have made a stonking profit, shattering analysts’ predictions. But there’s more – Lucent, another old dinosaur, has done it as well. Compaq and HP are down but SUN is up, Informix is up, Unisys is up. What’s going on? Simple. Companies which are successfully leveraging the Internet, either by providing the technologies to support it or by using it as a business tool, are winning. Companies which fail to tell a coherent eCommerce story, or which fail to exploit the capabilities the Web provides, are losing out. Sure, the world is more complex than this simplistic view might suggest, but even with other factors taken into account, companies big and small are finding it very difficult to buck this trend.

(First published 22 April 1999)