Good news is bad news

Journalists are quite gleeful when bad news comes our way. We are considered to be vultures, and we are often viewed in the same regard as lawyers, morticians and other bottom-feeding parasitic scum. We live by the motto, "bad news is good news".

This year was actually quite a successful one for SA IT, if one looks past the headline-grabbing larger IT players.

Jason Norwood-Young, Technology editor, ITWeb

This year was a particularly good one for lawyers, morticians and journalists, as it was a bad year for everyone else. It started with a depressed market, followed by predictions that things were turning up again, but by the end of the second quarter hope turned to despair as stocks plummeted, jobs were shed, and we were inundated with bad news, ie good news.

The culmination of disaster was the World Trade Centre collapse and the disintegration of the rand`s value against the dollar and pound. There were very few slow news days.

So before everyone leaves on their end-of-year vacations, I would like to highlight some of the good things that happened, so that readers can start the silly season confident in IT in SA.

This year was actually quite a successful one for SA IT, if one looks past the headline-grabbing larger IT players. The amount of innovation from smaller companies was staggering, and the successes that they are starting to reap are well-deserved. Some great technologies, most of which are still highly unpublicised, emerged primarily in the business-to-business software space. Portal solutions to document management systems, along with some surprising Web initiatives, ERP software, integration and middleware products, all mysteriously appeared in the market.

Or maybe not so mysteriously. Two years ago the market was flooded with venture capital. Give the local developers between six months to a year to build their products, and the last 12 months to mature their offerings. This technology is now ready for export, and with the rand at an all-time low, South African developers could see some major sales locally and abroad. The US slump hasn`t dropped their software prices - in fact quite the opposite. Software, unlike hardware, gets more expensive with time. With overseas companies tightening their belts, they may have to look at imported software, creating a sizeable dollar-based export market for local developers.

Two other events this year that will have positive medium- and long-term results are the ITU Africa conference and the Presidential IT Task Force gathering. At both, I got a sense of a country and continent committed to embracing IT as a tool to alleviate social and economic disparities between the First World and Africa.

IT has been used as a tool to disenfranchise the "have-nots" for too long, but a new generation of African leaders will not be hoodwinked any longer, and many - our president included - seem to understand enough about IT to make strategies that will benefit us all in the long run. What the president and ministers don`t know, they seem keen to learn, and IT experts are finally volunteering to teach them.

The investment in communications infrastructure for Africa is also heartening. It is a prerequisite to a modern IT infrastructure, and the fact that the biggest international telecoms and satellite infrastructure providers are pumping investment into the continent means, firstly, that they have faith that Africa will deliver a return, and secondly, that it will be capable of delivering that return by making business within Africa and with the rest of the world possible.

So as you wend your way down to the coast for your holiday, children screaming in the back seat, remember when you come back in January that there is still an IT industry, and it is not as battered as the newspapers want you to believe. Also take glee in knowing that, when the market does improve (be that next year or 2003), us journalists will be back to our slow news days. For us, good news is no news at all.