Peter Griffin: Still waiting for the Next Big Thing

I have a love-hate relationship with tech trade fairs.

I love collecting enough pens, mousepads and peppermints to see me through the next year. I love stumbling across some start-up IT company that has scraped its pennies together to rent a phone-booth sized stand, but is pulling bigger crowds than Microsoft.

But I hate the sales pitches, and let's face it, the tech shows are all about selling. Here stalk the box shifters from the multinationals, who just want your business card so they can continue the pitch online - and sign you up to their monthly newsletter.

It was more of the latter at CeBIT Australia this year. There was an urgency in the air, as if monthly sales targets depended on contracts being signed on the showroom floor.

You can put up with all that if there's a swag of cutting-edge products to check out - a line-up that sends you home raving about the Next Big Thing. Not so CeBIT Australia. There's something wrong when the biggest headline grabber is the man flogging mobile phone covers that smell of marijuana.

Tech-shows are always a good gauge of the sector's health - and a pointer of where it is heading. I remember visiting the flagship CeBIT, in Hanover, in giddy 2000. I spent only an afternoon there and saw a fraction of what was on offer, but it blew me away. It was the advent of DVD+RW drives, wearable MP3 - yep, some poncey ski-jacket with a Philips MP3 player sewn into it and earphones that sprouted from the hood. There was a lot of buzz from Intel about the 4GHz processor and the speeds it would bring to the desktop. Palm Pilots and the Symbian operating system were big and Linux was coming out of the closet.

You knew that on several fronts - operating systems, hardware, gadgets, wireless standards - we were steaming ahead.

By all accounts the Hannover gig was big this year - nearly 8000 exhibitors and three-quarters of a million visitors. The fair is big business for all concerned. It's annual turnover tops $500 million.

But now it feels as though we've entered the eye of some technological tornado, a calm before the next phase of innovation. Is the IT industry less innovative than it was in the late 90s? No. If anything it is more serious about research and development than ever, with Silicon Valley's inhabitants all trying to spend their way through the recession.

Is there less hype about new technology? Hell yes, but that doesn't fully explain the quiet.

Where we are at now is a consequence of the industry's nervous breakdown in 2001. That's when it became painfully obvious that the slow pace of bureaucratic change was dragging the staggering growth of the "new economy" to a standstill.

It's all down to technology lag time. Especially pronounced in business IT, lag time is the gap before the major institutions, Governments, banks and utilities adopt the next wave of technology.

The IT industry blossomed in the 80s and 90s as each new technology was taken up - mainframes sprouting green screens were replaced by mini-computers and later PC local area networks. Databases were refined and centralised. The internet and mobile phones revolutionised business. Because the US economy was growing and companies were spending money on new technological inventions, the lag time was manageable.

Not any more. The economic slump has extended that lag, leaving the IT vendors struggling to meet their targets.

Analysts talked about the "technology lull" all last year, the lack of growth in IT investment as corporates sat on technology they'd installed in the mid-90s. That lull is at its most pronounced now.

Take my set-up here. I'm writing this on a bog-standard Dell Pentium III, looking at a recycled Compaq monitor. I'm running Windows NT, a 7-year-old platform and an outdated version of Lotus Notes. My machine is devoid of CD-ROM, sound card or USB - so I can't introduce alien devices and bring down the network.

Wilson and Horton is no different to any other large company, seeking to squeeze maximum value out of its IT systems.

Which begs the question, what will be the Next Big Thing that will speed up the upgrade treadmill? And when will economic conditions allow it to arrive?

It would be wrong to say nothing new has arrived lately. There's plenty of stuff coming through from the hardware and software vendors but no major breakthroughs.

Nanotechnology - computing at a molecular level - will supply a few of those soon, no doubt. Wireless connectivity still has massive potential as does new power technology - super-efficient processors and gas-powered batteries. But the big new kicker may well be a bit of an old thing - broadband.

Except in the most switched-on countries, such as Korea, broadband penetration is low - a miserable 3 per cent here. That's thanks to the incumbent telcos that guard their networks jealously and charge inflated prices.

But broadband access could be the catalyst to get the ball rolling again. Imagine video and music on demand over your flat-rate DSL connection. Or getting exactly the rich content you want, quickly, safely and relatively cheaply.

With high-speed connectivity, the options open up and so do the opportunities for a growth-starved industry.

The Next Big Thing is already here, only most of us haven't got our hands on it yet.

* Peter Griffin visited CeBIT and a guest of Hannover Fairs

* Email Peter Griffin