How new trends in technology affect or will affect business is an interesting topic. It makes a great one-hour talk or a two-hour seminar. The latest ideas and technologies can be presented with a certain brevity and vagueness but with enthusiasm and strong and somewhat unsubstantiated predictions that they will have far-reaching effects. This volume can be viewed as such a talk in book form. It provides a once-over-lightly, confident view of what is happening as business responds to environmental and technological changes; it sparingly surveys new technological developments. It is the kind of book people might wish to read in order to get acquainted with the latest futuristic ideas, acronyms, and buzz words and to get an impression of the potential importance of information technology to their own and their organization’s future.

This book starts with five short chapters; the next 90 pages contain 16 appendices, and the last part consists of references and a bibliography. The first chapter surveys effects of information technology on business. The second chapter gives three types of examples; trading systems dominate the discussion. Chapter 3 surveys about 25 technological advances. Chapter 4 surveys the current state of about a dozen technologies, but its main emphasis is on standards for technologies. The last chapter is divided between the future personal computer and revolutionary or speculative technologies (such as superconducting computers and optical computers).

The 16 appendices are a curious mixture of seven short tutorials on basic subjects (including business, economics, investment, decision making, computers, and humans as information processors); eight short explanations of technologies (expert systems, OOP, intelligent databases, text-based management systems, hypertext, neural networks, groupware, and CASE); and a review of communications standards.

The best feature of the book is that it presents a short overview of the impact of the computer, the technologies, and standards in a confident style. The undesirable features are unbalanced coverage, uneven explanation depth, a mixture of simplistic and complex explanations, excessive jargon, a strange mixture of appendices, a tendency to present everything as if it will certainly happen and have a big impact, a lack of references substantiating many claims, and a long bibliography that is not organized by topic.