Top CEOs Offer Sober Advice for 2003

But take heart. The average desktop PC in corporate America is roughly 3.75 years old, according to market researcher Gartner. Surely, it's got to be updated sometime. Ditto for all the networking gear, printers, monitors, servers and hard drives installed since the great Y2K retrofit. More and more, it looks like 2003 will see some sort of rebound. How much, though, is anyone's guess. With regard to growth rates, Arthur Coviello, CEO of RSA Security, says he's heard everything from a decline of 3 percent to an increase of 5 percent projected for next year. They're all quixotically reliable as far as he's concerned.

"All the theories I have heard are consistent,consistently wrong," Coviello says. "The real truth is embodied in a metaphor I've been using. We're finally out of the woods on this economy, only we've stepped into a clearing engulfed in fog."

In this feature, VARBusiness' first Signature Series on the IT economy, we sort through the clouds of conflicting data circulating in the marketplace and single out leaders with the vision to see their way clear. The insights they share with us constitute the new realities that will govern how business will be done in the future. In the passages that follow, we address everything from business models to killer apps to increased government oversight of our industry. But, first, we address that thorny issue perturbing so many: growth.

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