The first decade of IT Week’s existence has seen plenty of changes in the computing industry, as you might expect. Some heads of IT departments ended up sitting on the board of directors, for example, and servers grew in capacity while getting smaller and cooler. But any of us could have predicted that. More intriguing has been the success and failure of specific products and technologies.

Clearly, the killer application of the previous 10 years has been the web browser. But, the question is, whose? Back in May 1998, Microsoft was still pushing Internet Explorer 4.0, which came bundled with Windows 98. Netscape Navigator was the most popular browser at the time and a big court case followed over Microsoft’s bundling of IE with all copies of Windows.

It was always on the cards that Microsoft would win this tussle. But how many of us predicted that the company would later see its dominant market share, ­ apparently unassailable at over 95 per cent, ­ gradually become eroded by superb quality open-source challengers since 2003?

Perhaps the unpredictability of developments in the computing industry centres on timing. In the early-to-mid 1990s, I worked alongside a highly respected IT journalist who, each January, would announce: “This is going to be the year that wireless technologies take off!” Eventually, he was correct, of course, but only after he had made the prediction eight Januaries in a row.

Bluetooth, in particular, took its time to win acceptance across the user market. But then, early Bluetooth kit was full of glitches and a security liability, plus the products were expensive.

The launch of IT Week was not the only big computing news in May 1998. That very same month, Apple announced its new home computer, the iMac. At the time, Apple sales comprised four per cent of the worldwide PC market. Some years later, that figure dropped to two per cent and has only recently reached six per cent. In terms of PC market sales, it’s fair to say that the arrival of the iMac was insignificant.

However, the iMac turned out to be one of the most influential products of the past decade. It created a thankfully short-lived trend for colourful translucent plastic casing on all manner of products from mice and keyboards, to scanners and printers, and consigned beige-box designs to museums. It ditched all the serial ports, which turned the trickle of USB peripherals onto the market into a tsunami within six months, and turned the DV market on to FireWire. It killed off the floppy disk drive and championed the use of combo DVD-CD writers. Not least, it introduced the concept of consumer-friendly, plug-and-play internet.

Remember, this was an Apple computer that had no impact on worldwide PC sales, and offered absolutely nothing new in terms of PC technology. So why were other PC makers so obviously influenced by it?

Apple’s trick was to take a clutch of existing technologies that no one else dared commit to, and then make them work.

You can see this in all manner of developments over the past 10 years, from the evolution of the smartphone to the rapid expansion of cheap broadband. Apple was a late-comer to the portable music player market too, remember.

So as I raise a glass to celebrate IT Week’s first decade, I also wish for the effective execution of some old product ideas in the next. Please, inventors out there, can you start with electronic paper?