As I.T. Goes, So Goes Forrester?

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Sunday Interview: "FORRESTER RESEARCH made a name for itself during the dot-com surge in the late 1990's by selling research that promised to decode the onslaught of new technologies for businesses. When the Internet bubble burst, sending much of the technology industry into a long recession, Forrester was hardly immune: its stock price tumbled, along with those of many tech companies, though it has come back somewhat in the last two years.

Today, Forrester, based in Cambridge, Mass., remains a significant technology research business, exceeded only by Gartner Inc., which had six times the revenue last year. Forrester's chief executive, George F. Colony, spoke recently about current trends in technology - like radio frequency identification tags, or RFID, used to identify things like products or pets - as well as consolidation in the research field and his ho-hum attitude toward Google. Following are excerpts from the conversation. "

Q. Your industry is consolidating. Your primary competitor, Gartner, recently bought META; last year, you acquired Giga. Is there enough business for you and Gartner?

A. It's like complex brain surgery. To get one opinion is probably not the right way to go. So there are two opinions to be had out there, and we're one of them. We don't care if we're the first opinion or second opinion, but there are only two to be had - and we're one of them.

Q. Let's talk about Google. You came out against it to some degree last year, citing competition from Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. But Google has done well. Were you wrong?

A. This is how I saw it: that Google has three major challenges in front of it. No. 1 is competition. They have a lot of money, a lot of power and they want Google's business, so probably No. 1 for Google is competition. Problem 2 for Google is what I call "switching costs." There are no switching costs to move from one search engine to another. Before Google, I used AltaVista. I changed to Google in about 27 seconds. I will leave Google in about 27 seconds. The third problem is, Google is a fantastic technology for a page-oriented, HTML-based Internet, which is what we have today. The problem is, we're not going to stay in a page-oriented world.

Q. That assumes that Google wouldn't be able to adapt. And we're still going to need to search through all the information out there.