Reasonable competition speeds the pace of innovation. Companies will promote the proprietary aspects of their browsers and applications, and they should. But the navigation of the Web has to be open. If the day comes when you need six browsers on your machine, the World Wide Web will no longer be the World Wide Web.
Predictor: Berners-Lee, Tim
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for the New York Times, reporter Steve Lohr quotes Tim Berners-Lee and paraphrases his views on the subject of commercializing the World Wide Web. Lohr writes:”As the Web increasingly becomes part of the commercial mainstream, the [W3] consortium and Mr. Berners-Lee will be sorely tested … Mr. Berners-Lee clearly recognizes the challenge. ‘There’s always the threat that a particular company would dominate the market and control the standards of the Web,’ he acknowledged during an interview at a Web conference in Boston … ‘The essence of the Web is that it’s a universe of information,’ he said. ‘And it wouldn’t be universal if it was tied, in any way, to one company’… The danger, in Berners-Lee’s view, is that browsers or Web-programming languages, like Sun’s Java, could become the equivalent of competing ‘network operating systems’ – each proprietary, setting off turf wars on the Web, so that users would need several browsers to tap into everything on the Web … ‘Reasonable competition speeds the pace of innovation,’ Mr. Berners-Lee said. ‘Companies will promote the proprietary aspects of their browsers and applications, and they should. But the navigation of the Web has to be open. If the day comes when you need six browsers on your machine, the World Wide Web will no longer be the World Wide Web.'”
Biography:Tim Berners-Lee of CERN first released his revolutionary World-Wide Web for initial use in 1991 and with it shared his invention HTML (hypertext mark-up language). He later served as director of W3 Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations whose goal was to find ways to help the Web reach its full potential. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: December 14, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: New York Times
Title, headline, chapter name: His Goal: Keeping the World Wide Web Worldwide
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/951217-NYT/
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Bruno, Marian Theresa