Surprise, Surprise!

Like surprises? You must have loved 2004. First there was the wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl. Then we found out there weren't any WMDs after all. Then the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. Who'd a thunk?

The IT industry pulled a few rabbits out if its hat as well. Here are the biggest surprises in five major industry sectors.E-business

Oracle And PeopleSoft Sealed The Deal Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's world got a little bigger when Oracle finally acquired its rival, PeopleSoft. Now that Larry has gotten what he asked for, let's see how much he really likes it.

IBM Quit The PC Business Hey, companies drop underproducing business lines every day, but IBM invented the widescale personal-computer business. No more, though: Your "IBM" computer will now be coming to you courtesy of a Chinese company, Lenovo (in this case, truly "the new"), which instantly becomes No. 4 in worldwide market share.

Google Went Dutch Google's long-anticipated IPO hit some bumps, along the way, but became a reality on August 19th in an unconventional modified Dutch auction. Who said the Internet was dead?

Apple Made A Play For The Enterprise When Apple introduced a line of high-performance servers in January, clearly pitched at the enterprise market, much of the business wondered, "Apple? Enterprise?!?!?" But indeed, the company is making some forays into non-traditional (for it) sectors that leverage its OS X platform for business--supercomputing is another area. And to think we all thought Apple was just a music-gadget maker.Software
Linux Gained Stature In The Enterprise. . . . .and around the world in various city and state governments. Open source, in general, gained momentum with the Firefox browser and others taking market share from Microsoft's dominant—but flawed—Internet Explorer browser. Also, Sun announced it would open source Solaris, while Novell turned its fortunes around with its Linux move, including buying SuSE.Microsoft And Sun Made Nice Did anyone expect these two longtime combatants to drop the beef and start to work together? Check your prediction lists for 2004, and you won't find that one anywhere. But Sun got tired of struggling to retain its business clout and take on Goliath in court, and Microsoft ponied up enough cash to make it worth Sun's while to drop its lawsuits. Maybe we'll see Java.NET yet.Security
We Failed To Secure Our Systems For all the chatter about security over the year, the untold hours spent installing and updating software and protective hardware, you'd think we'd have the situation under control by now. But you'd be wrong. Spam remains very much undead. Viruses and worms are flitting about at record speeds.

The threat environment is more ominous at year end, not less. While it's true there hasn't been a "big one" since the first half of the year, there's little doubt that another super-infection will break out, and that it will circle the globe in minutes. Why? For one thing, hackers are getting smarter. They've learned to delegate. By commandeering unsecured computers across the hall and around the globe, and stringing them together, hackers are building evil bot networks, the more efficiently to cyberpick our pockets.

E-voting Didn't Blow Up Rampant skepticism notwithstanding, the e-voting fiasco that had been predicted by voting rights activists across the country never materialized. To be sure, the process was not flawless, and some grumbling continues to be heard, but e-voting machines performed better than expected.Networking

Hackers Offered Cisco Source Code For Sale We all know that if you want the latest Eminem CD, you can find it online and download it easily. But ever tried downloading Cisco's Pix proprietary security firewall software using a P2P network? A shadowy group called the Source Code Club offered the security software via an online newsgroup for $24,000 to all takers. No word on whether anyone actually made the buy.

U.S. Broadband Grew Slowly Surely the U.S. is the most advanced technological society in the world. Well-wired and ready for connections. . .or are we? Not compared to other parts of the world. Korea and Japan, for example, are well ahead of the U.S. in broadband adoption, and are already well into the next generation of broadband, while here we're still struggling to make sense of our DSL connections, not to mention our TiVos and our camphones.

China Became A Networking Powerhouse Think that all China makes are cheap toys, counterfeit DVDs, and sneakers? Well how about Terabit core switches? China has become a networking powerhouse, with Chinese firms partnering with networking giants like 3Com. And it is also becoming a huge networking market—one of the fastest-growing carrier Ethernet markets in the world, with the number of Chinese Ethernet service connections doubling in the first half of 2004 alone, to 30 million subscribers.Mobile & Wireless

Broadband Flowed Like Water, Sewage Wireless broadband is becoming a municipal utility, as dozens of cities have started the process of creating public wireless networks. Not surprisingly, this trend has drawn the wrath of private-sector broadband providers who claim government has no business getting into the wireless business.Convergence Took Off While sales of traditional PDAs flattened, sales of smartphones, which combine PDA and phone functionality, started soaring. In the U.S., the palmOne Treo was the best-selling smartphone, according to market studies, while, worldwide, smartphones based on the Symbian platform prevailed. Microsoft made some progress as a smartphone platform vendor but still hasn't become a major player. One potential star, though, is Linux. PalmSource said it would port the Palm OS to that platform.

Consolidation Accelerated At the start of the year, there were six nationwide wireless operators in the U.S. At the end of the year, there were four, two of which had agreed to merge. At year-end, only one national wireless player—T-Mobile—and a handful of smaller and regional carriers didn't participate in consolidation. Given the market power of the newer, big players, though, don't be surprised to see some of those smaller players gobbled up in the next year.

Flashmobs Fizzled Supercomputing remained safe--for now. The informal tying together of scores or hundreds of laptops for the purpose of carrying out. . . something. . .has proven to be a solution in search of a problem. Turns out ganging microprocessors together isn't the best vehicle for performing advanced scientific calculations. What it is good for, remains undetermined.

Robots Ruled, Sort Of In what may be the best marketing deal for robots yet, summer moviegoers interested in iRobot, the movie, logged onto the Internet and also found, iRobot, the company. The company manufactures Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner. Honda's Asimo, a humanoid robot, got a software upgrade this year, enabling it to jog, work its way around obstacles, and respond to human touch. Toyota introduced its own humanoid robot in March. So far, lots of ink for these bots, but surprisingly little for them to do.

Keith Ferrell, David Haskin, Mark Glaser, Preston Gralla, Fredric Paul, and Don St. John contributed to this report.0