Internet: Still Early Days

Seth Goldin reminds us that the Internet is still its infancy, and cites 10 reasons why he believes that there's about to be a significant flourishing of Net companies and business successes.

  1. Penetration. (read: population)
  2. Bandwidth.
  3. Tools. (read: ease programming and power of software)
  4. Servers. (read redunction in price of storage)
  5. Wifi. (read: ubiquity)
  6. Multimedia. (read: dynamic, rich UIs & media)
  7. Grandmothers.
  8. Teenagers.
  9. VC (read: cheap money)
  10. The death of TV.

I just hope this isn't a recipe for a new round of DotCom overly-cooked nuts.

On a positive note, what does make me wonder is what the 'Zero generation' (or the 'Naughties' - kids born between 2000 and 2010) will create of the net. As Seth points out, today there is a generation of teenage kids "who have completely and permanently integrated the net into their lives and are about to go to work and to college."  

Today's teenagers will tee it up for the Zeros. What the Zeros will create with the future combined tools of software, the net and Nanotech, one can hardly imagine. As HAL's father once wrote:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
(Arthur C Clarke, 1961)