Cyber Utopia a Mirage

The technology will survive, it will remain useful, but the hype will cool. Protocol will be refined, and all the free goodies likely will evaporate. There will still be interesting stuff going on, but the shrill messiahs will latch onto something else. The rest of us will be able to get some work done. There is something revolutionary happening here, we have this great new way to find out stuff. But the Internet is not about to reconfigure the human heart or change anything that matters. What matters is what always has mattered; what always will matter. It is distressing whenever humans decide that some technology or other is going to substantially alter their lives.

Cyber Utopia a Mirage

I feel pretty cranky … kick-the-neighbor’s-cat cranky … I’m weary of the pretension and condescension of those who believe nirvana is here, frying quietly in the circuits of some magic box. I’m sick of the cyber hype … It’s more Edgar Cayce than Carl Jung out there, Boopsie. It will not last in this form, no matter how many obsessives are out there. Already I know reasonable folks who’ve decided that cruising the Net is about as vapid an exercise as cruising the mall, looking at stuff they don’t necessarily want to buy. Granted the Net’s much bigger, there’s lots more stuff that one doesn’t want to buy (or buy into) but the fascination eventually wears off … Besides, the telecommunications companies have caught on and sooner or later they’re going to impose some capitalist rationality on the whole system. It’s going to cost more – a lot more.

The Internet, Your Company and You

This year and the next few are going to be great, fun, exciting, mind-blowing, challenging (and tiring) times to be participating in the Internet as it transitions from grand experiment to one lane of the (sorry, gotta say it once) Information Super-Duper-Highway.

The Internet, Your Company and You

Arguably, the biggest challenge the Internet faces is the millions of new users suddenly set loose on it, with little or no cyber-training in “netiquette,” few controls and often little accountability – and great expectations of what the Internet should offer and what they should be “entitled” to do.

The Internet, Your Company and You

ThereÕs oceans of information we can’t yet get via the Internet. Let’s bring a full lake’s worth up. And let’s get some real end-user information search/browse/navigate/view tools which help us use the wealth of Internet services and resources.

The Internet, Your Company and You

My real hopes for the next few years are solutions to the outstanding technical, procedural and political bottlenecks standing in the way of true Internet growth … Bandwidth to the user remains the ultimate bottleneck for Internet or any more-than-ASCII interactive use … Whether data-over-cable will materialize remains to be seen; my crystal ball tersely suggests “technical support, security and assured bandwidth problems remain nontrivial.”

The Internet, Your Company and You

The really big news in the coming years will be the intersection (but hopefully not the collision) of mainstream corporate-accepted applications and Internet apps, so that corporate users can access Internet information from their current clients (Notes, Word, PowerPoint and Acrobat Reader); and leading corporate data formats.

The Internet, Your Company and You

The basic process of “connecting to the Internet” and using its “basic services” will become a simple, workable, shrinkwrapped or even built-in capability … Users will still want to be involved in making the choice of account providers, but starter lists will be built-in or auto-dialed, software will be preinstalled, and account-specific configuration will become truly simple.