This internet thing? It's gonna be Big!

In 1995 there were 6 million global internet users*.  Today there are almost 2 billion**. 

It’s hard for us to imagine what we were thinking in 1995 when all this was really starting.  It’s not that long ago.  I remember sitting in a taxi with a friend of mine, Andy.  We were driving down Boylston Street in Boston and outside of the Hynes Auditorium.  We were driving by a sushi bar where I worked in graduate school. I will never forget that moment when Andy turned to me and said “This internet thing – it’s gonna be big!”  I recall thinking, I bet this thing is going to be something. I wonder if we can make some money from it.    Ahh, if I only… 

In retrospect, it all seems so clear.  But what are the things that are going on around us now that seem a little iffy or confusing or that don’t appear useful or ready for prime time that in 10 years or 20 years will be life changing and we won’t know what we did prior to those dark ages? 

For more context on what we were thinking about in the mid-nineties, I pulled out my yellowed copy of Michael Dertouzos What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives.  What I found interesting about this book is that some of the predictions were spot on and some oddly naïve about just how much humans can change.

A sampling of some things that came to be includes

• Collaboration with colleagues across time-zones and region
• We work without necessarily going to the office (which may not even exist)
• Connectivity and computing resources are readily available and ubiquitous
• Video and audio are available on demand
• Intellectual work is at the center of functionality on the web
• Our social interactions are extended and enriched by technology
• Cellular networks provide information access anywhere
• The internet is an “information marketplace” where commerce is transacted and information is freely available

It is hard to see how difficult it was to predict the changes that we now take for granted.  At the time this book was written, broadband access was not yet available.  With dial-up lines, download a feature film was unthinkable.  It would have taken a month to download a feature film!  In 1998 only one half of one percent of the world’s population was connected.  Tools were rudimentary, web sites lacked content management capabilities, applications were costly and hard to update, and integration where it existed was hard-coded and brittle.

One thing that is striking is how terminology has changed since the 1995 vision of possibilities.  We don’t refer to the “information marketplace”, we go on the web.  Our phones are connected to headsets by Bluetooth functionality, not “bodynets.”  I don’t know anyone with a “custom newspaper printer” – we might use the regular old-fashioned printer to print an article.   I have not seen automatization tools – I am familiar with workflow, integrated applications, scripts and agents, and web services.  We don’t leverage “data sockets” for information about the weather but do connect to web sites and web applications.  “Groupwork” is simply work or collaboration if we need to preface a type of technology with the term.   

There were a few misses as well.   We are still waiting to go to work by donning virtual reality helmets, shake hands with a colleague using haptic interfaces, my kitchen has not yet been outfitted with an autocook that takes my orders in plain English, checks what I have had lately, determines what I should be eating based on my integrated bio monitoring devices which read the latest information from my electronic health records.  My bed does not have an integrated sound system and microphone that customizes the songs played by my wake up service based on my preferences from the “automatized” e-form I filled out with spoken commands.  Certainly some of the technology concepts are not challenging (such as similar-music based on preferences) – but the ways in which we bring to life innovations are difficult to predict.  Our attempts at seeing how the future pans out is usually pretty clunky compared to how we actually realize these things.

One thing that is clear from all of the predictions – the future will bring things that seemed impossible just a few short years back.  But Dertouzos explains how many of these things work – they require attributes, labels, profiling, consistent terminology, common languages for “e-forms” and “data sockets”. 

We may call these things by different names now, but the concepts are the same as then.  And the need for metadata and consistent controlled vocabularies was foreseen as a key ingredient to all of this great technology that is and will be, impacting our lives and changing our world. 

* http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meeker-matt-murphy-2011-2#-26

**http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm