Overview

Much of the Internet culture will seem as quaint to future users of the Information Highway as stories of wagon trains and pioneers on the Oregon Trail do to us today.

Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, 1995

It s a sign of how right Bill Gates was back in 1995 when he wrote of the unpredictable future of the Internet that even the language he used then now seems so out of date. No-one today talks of the information highway , and the special Internet culture of 1995 has been supplanted by something new, in which selling has a powerful role, big businesses figure large alongside small organizations, and which caters for new mass audiences. But if we stick to Mr. Gates wagon train analogy, the Internet wagon train has still a long way to go before it reaches California. There is a great deal of unpredictable change still to come, and it s worth spending some time thinking through the likely shape of the land that lies ahead.

First, we have identified a shift from an Internet dominated by early technology enthusiasts and highly educated specialists to a mass market. Most Internet users are not IT people, and many access the network from home. This shift is not going to be reversed, and the trends that it has ushered in are only likely to get stronger. In particular, technology is being replaced by marketing and customer service. Internet services are increasingly being built around the needs and desires of the...