It's nearly the end of 2002 and things have been happening. Every company employing more than three people has a website and broadband internet access. We're all trading through internet shops, everybody's delighted with the return on investment their IT offers and I've just taught 15 pigs to fly.
In fact, the picture of who's doing what in IT in small business environments is far from clear - every research company and just about every manufacturer has its own idea of where we are.
Probably top of the software supplier tree is Microsoft, which has commissioned its own research into who's doing what. "Over the last 12 months, we have seen two key trends in the small business IT market," says Andrew Pickup, small business manager for the company. "These are a significant increase in investment on IT security and rapid adoption of broadband and wireless internet access."
These factors have affected buying patterns indirectly as well as directly, explains Pickup. Research quoted in these pages before, from the British Chamber of Commerce, said 7% of companies had been hacked in the last 12 months and 93% had experienced virus attacks.
"Right now the number one reason for small business moving to the new Windows XP platform is enhanced security and reliability,' says Pickup - attributes that Microsoft also trumpeted about the last version of Windows, strangely enough.
"More than 50% of small business customers cited this as the reason for upgrading," he continues, "and since Windows XP offers a built-in internet connection firewall it can help small businesses protect themselves against unplanned and unwanted interruptions."
The other element cited by Pickup is, of course, broadband, which brings with it a set of opportunities - but also a set of drawbacks. "People are now addressing email overload problems," says Peter Chadha, principal consultant at accountancy firm BDO Stoy Hayward. "Critical problems have arisen over sharing files via email - it multiplies data storage problems, creates version control headaches and no one knows where a file is. Also, people had huge inboxes. IT managers are now addressing this."
It is possible to add more disk space, but the better-informed are formulating email policies - including group policies about trivial emails - and forcing people to use the phone instead.
Before leaving broadband it is worth bearing in mind its other major drawback - geographical coverage simply isn't there yet. "Rural SMEs hoping for broadband have realised they are going to have to wait a long time," says a spokesman for yet another internet company about to launch. "[That's] hardly a great situation for the small business community, or indeed for Britain, which relies on the success of small businesses." The sound readers can now hear might be that of grinding axes and vested interests, but it's not an unfair point.
This is going to reinforce the interest in emerging technologies over the coming year. Mobile communications have been very big news, although only a minority of people use their PDAs to collect email on the move. Bluetooth phones with GPRS connections are making this easier to do and the advent of 3G - eventually - will make it faster. Alternatives such as satellite internet are becoming available and customers are noticing with some surprise that although the transmitters are out of this world, the costs don't always follow.
Other elements that characterise the small business market seem to repeat history. Printer manufacturer Epson points to the falling price of quality colour imaging and the increased awareness among small businesses of the importance of a good logo or picture, but also the reluctance to invest in the technology because price perceptions are out of date.
And the increased requirement for data storage has increased again. You can only hope that in the coming year things such as document management systems will become more widespread to enable the organisation of the terabytes of information that companies are going to have. Remember when that 2Gb PC looked as big as anything you were ever going to need?
Other things that were expected to take off have yet to do so in a mass market fashion. BDO Stoy Hayward's Chadha points to application service providers (ASPs) - you remember, the ones who were going to host all of your applications and allow you to log on to your word processor or whatever it was that you wanted instead of having it on your own computer.
It's starting to happen in the form of outsourcing. Jeff Meulman, managing director of Via Networks in the UK, has noticed his customers opting for it. "Indeed a Via survey of 151 SMEs' results (September 2002) showed that 'access to skilled personnel' was the number one reason for outsourcing IT to managed service providers," he says.
Star Office is attracting a lot of attention. It is certainly not Microsoft Office yet, but certain software companies aren't laughing as hard as they were at it. And given that it has shipped 7m copies since May this year, that is probably wise. IP telephony - phoning through the net and therefore not paying the call charge - is starting to look appealing but is not doing the numbers right now.
Where this leaves us exactly is difficult to say, but there are some common themes. For instance, the skills people apply to their new broadband installations need work. Used properly, broadband is a new marketing and trading medium rather than just a means to send the odd email.
Overall it seems likely many of the technology issues in 2003 won't be about the technology itself but about managing technology, so that it remains usable in spite of its size and breadth.
