Netscape is … betting that companies will want to create their own in-house Webs – advanced networks with state-of-the-art graphics. These tapestries of information will then help firms stay in close touch with employees in far-flung divisions, as well as with customers and suppliers.
Need tickets to a Broadway show? Your computer will handle the transaction. Just give it a price range, seating preference and a credit card. Computers will even make it easier for you to link to a doctor in another city or connect people around the world in virtual classrooms. “Those kind of technologies will become ubiquitous with more processing power.”
There should be a national debate about what kind of media system we should have … The debate has been framed so far by a handful of communications giants who have been working overtime to convince the American people that the data highway will be little more than a virtual electronic shopping mall.
The World Wide Web, as it currently exists, cannot possibly succeed on the scale now being widely predicted. Web browsers, home pages and HTML-coding courses will all, inevitably, hit the wall.
The enormous market for entertainment, whether it’s movies or interactive games, will pay for much of the construction of a high-capacity highway to the home. The existing highway – the Internet in particular – will connect with it, widening its circuits and its reach, driven especially by the burgeoning business-to-business markets. And off all these arteries, enjoying full access to them, will be hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of smaller communities, linked by geography, line of business, or special interest.
A lot of this “too hard to use” stuff will go away. Radio was so messy for the first 20 years, it wasn’t funny. Cars ditto – you had to be a mechanic to drive one.
People on the Internet are talking as if they are Native Americans, and the Pilgrims are on the shore. They think of this as an Edenic environment, a garden, and [they] hear over the horizon the combines coming to harvest its fruits for commercial purposes.
Despite a lot of current press, the Internet is not about to fall apart … Life, the Universe, and the Internet will continue to prevail. So, so long, and thanks for all the attention. Clearly the perceived problems are mostly harmless.
The Internet will become much more than a web for sharing data among the world’s computers. [Instead,] the Internet will begin to function more like a single giant computer, with its intelligence and processing power distributed among the millions of machines connected to it.
The present is more frightening than any imaginable future I might dream up … If Marshall McLuhan were alive today, he’d have a nervous breakdown.