Fad or future? 1998's top tech stories

"14. Portal madness

Companies engage in a mad rush to launch their own "portals," gateways to the Net for consumers. This results in old and new media alliances, highlighted by Disney's taking a major stake in Infoseek and Netscape's strategic move to promote its Netcenter, as well as relanuches by Microsoft and America Online. Next year, look to see whether the hype generates any real profits."

while today they would have written:

14. LLM madness

Companies engage in a mad rush to launch their own "chatbots", gateways to intelligence for consumers and enterprises alike. This results in unprecedented alliances between big tech and research labs, highlighted by Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar bet on OpenAI and Amazon’s strategic stake in Anthropic, as well as aggressive pivots by Google and Meta to integrate generative agents into every product. Next year, look to see whether the massive compute costs can finally generate any real profits.