Future Web
Wait till you see what's coming. With high-speed access, new services, and graphics-rich interfaces coming soon, the Net will truly be a part of everything you do.by Michael Gowan
After technology's bleak 2000, you have to wonder if the skeptics were right: Maybe this thing called the Internet won't last. Tech stocks reside at frightening lows; online sales have slowed; layoffs are happening across the board.
But wait till you see what's coming. Until now, the Web has existed as a separate medium, a place you had to think about visiting. You decided to shop online instead of at a store. You sent an e-mail instead of giving your friend a call. But with a flurry of new developments--high-speed access, new ways of getting services, graphics-rich interfaces--the Net will become a part of everything we do.
The Net has evolved and simultaneously entered our everyday lives at dizzying speed. What began as a simple text interface has blossomed into a fully visual medium that can satisfy our desires for video, audio, and more. What started as a way to share information has become a worldwide marketplace where customers can buy anything at any hour. Where once we accessed this virtual world with 9600-bps modems, we now use DSL and cable modems to reach speeds at least 40 times greater.
Sure, the Net has endured its share of setbacks. A recent avalanche of dot-com deaths has shown the fallacy of launching a site without a good business plan. Even sites that have enjoyed some success, like Amazon and Etoys, are in a bit of trouble. And it turns out that buyers want to receive the items they buy on time--not a strong point of many sites. Factor in some persistent privacy concerns, and the utopian society some foresaw doesn't look so likely.
While perhaps no one could have forecast the Net's roller-coaster ride of the past five years, we've donned our prognosticating goggles to see where the next five years will take it. We talked to visionaries, key industry players, and analysts to find out where we're headed and when we'll get there. Ahead lies a world where you rent software and music instead of buying it; an Internet available anywhere, anytime, thanks to high-speed wireless access; a place where text, video, and sound merge into a seamless multimedia experience.
We begin with one of the most popular online areas, and the one that saw the most meteoric rise and fall during the last five years: Let's go shopping!
Trend One: E-Commerce--End of the Free Ride
Oh, the follies of youth. In 1998 and 1999, thanks to much-improved Internet technology, low start-up costs, and huge infusions of capital, we saw a multitude of e-commerce sites spring up, trying to sell us everything from pet food to automobiles. To attract customers, the companies devised some outrageous promotions: For instance, 800.com--a site that sells electronics, music, and videos--launched with a special offer of three CDs for $1, including shipping. A host of sites promised free Internet access to drive traffic to their sites.
But in 2000 the bubble burst. Overinflated stock prices fell, and the venture capitalists who backed many of the sites declined to invest any more. Some flourishing sites overextended their reach and burned through their VC cash. Sites that counted on drawing traffic by offering impossibly great deals learned a different lesson: Selling at a loss doesn't translate into profits.
The idea behind the giveaways and steeply discounted prices was, in trade speak, to build the brand. The greater the number of people who came to the site, the faster the site would become profitable. But that business plan won't work today or in the future.
"You don't want to drive traffic anymore," says Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings and a former chairman of the influential Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). "The whole concept of 'We've got traffic' is like, 'Hey, I've got a lot of people in my store.' That's not what retailers want. They want a lot of people buying. Driving traffic is a notion of the year 1999. Who wants traffic? You want revenues."
A glut of sites selling similar products and services created fierce competition. And just as happens in the offline world, the abundance drove many online start-ups out of business and paved the way for small, specialized businesses to be swallowed up by larger, more established firms. Take Fatbrain.com. The online bookseller started as a consumer book site a few years ago and evolved into a fairly successful business-to-business bookseller site. But when the dot-com shakeout came, Fatbrain.com found itself in a fiscally sticky situation.
Dan Rush, Fatbrain.com's vice president and general manager, explains: "We grew rapidly--sales doubled each of the past two fiscal years. Like any Internet company, we had growing pains. We were probably spending too much. We had two choices: Go get additional funding, or look for merger partners." The result: Competitor Barnes & Noble.com acquired the company, which now serves as its B2B arm. Thanks to the addition of Barnes & Noble.com's infrastructure and customer support, Fatbrain.com predicts it will turn a profit in 2001.
The lengthy list of dead dot coms is littered with high-profile sites such as Pets.com (remember its wildly popular sock puppet mascot?). Clearly, growth and name recognition aren't enough to guarantee that a business will survive.
Successful e-commerce sites give you a reason to come back, and good service is one of the the best ways to do that. Good customer service has many ingredients, but the most important are an easy shopping experience, a smooth-running site, and on-time delivery. If a site can't provide these, you won't be coming back anytime soon. So look for sites to focus more on service than on providing the lowest price. This strategy may yield higher prices, but it will deliver a better overall experience. With so many different places to shop online, a site that crashes or can't ship an order on time won't hold on to customers for long.
Convenience is another reason we shop online, and it's another area online retailers will look to improve. For example, online shops that are allied with physical stores can simplify the return process. If you buy an item from an online store and then decide you want to return it, you usually have to pay to ship it back. But now megastores such as Best Buy and Circuit City let you return items bought at their Web site to a real-world branch near you.
Expect this click-and-mortar trend to continue. Vint Cerf, chairman of ICANN and one of the innovators of TCP/IP, the protocol that lies at the root of the Internet, envisions a situation where small stores handle product returns for multiple online merchants. Some physical stores and their online siblings will merge, too. Sporting goods store REI is already experimenting with this setup. Walk into a store, and you'll find a kiosk that's connected to REI.com. If the local REI is out of snowshoes in your size, you can immediately order them online. It's the consolidated future.
But what about the bargains? Convenience may have kept people shopping online, but unbelievable discounts are what brought them there in the first place. On the Web of the future, you won't find three CDs for a dollar anymore, but great deals will still be out there. You'll just have to do some more comparison shopping to find them. Most of the best deals will feature overstocked goods and last season's products.
Trend Two: Rethinking Ownership
Traditionally, commerce has been straightforward: Customers pay for something and receive a physical product to have and to hold. You buy a music CD that you can carry around from your house to your car to your workplace. You buy Office 2000 and receive a CD-ROM that loads the program onto your computer. But that arrangement is going to change.
Just as with cable TV, you'll pay a monthly fee to get music and movies through the Net, or you'll pay a charge based on what you use. The first place this model will emerge is with music.
Right now, you can subscribe to sites such as EMusic.com, where $10 per month fetches you unlimited MP3 downloads. Once you download a song, it's yours to play when you wish, as many times as you want.
Soon subscriptions will include access to an unlimited amount of music streamed across the Net--but subscribers won't be able to save that music on their hard drive. With streaming services, your PC holds a few seconds of a file in a buffer, then plays that file while refreshing the buffer. Once the song is done, the data is gone. Right now, however, streams are plagued by bandwidth problems. A high-fidelity experience requires at least a 128-kbps stream for MP3 files (RealAudio and Windows Media Audio require less). If the connection lags, the song pauses.
MP3.com has relaunched a service that may serve as a bridge between product ownership and streaming subscriptions. With My.MP3.com, you buy a CD and place it in your PC's CD-ROM player while connected to the site. The service confirms that you possess the CD. So after you activate David Gray's latest CD, for example, My.MP3.com will stream "Babylon" to you wherever you are, regardless of whether you have the CD with you. Taking this idea a step further, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music are developing streaming services that require no physical product. You'll be able to listen to any song in the collection as many times as you want. But unlike downloads that you can transfer to a portable player, streamed music is available only while you're online. Eventually, subscription services will stream movies to you in the same way.
But entertainment isn't the only thing you'll subscribe to. In the future, you'll get your software this way, too, by subscribing to an application service provider (ASP) and accessing your applications through a Web browser. The software won't reside on your computer; it will remain on the ASP's servers.
ASPs exist now, offering access to database programs, project management apps, e-mail clients, and even Office 2000. Microsoft is so sure that this idea will succeed that the company is building an entire platform around it, called.Net..Net will allow various Web services to talk to each other and to consolidate their functions in one interface.
For instance, all your financial information--bank account balances, money market performance, and so on--may be available on the Web, says Alfredo Pizzirani,.Net's Windows product manager. But the pieces of information reside on different sites. "The only way to build a consolidated view of what my financial situation is, is to go to all these Web sites and cut and paste things into Excel," Pizzirani says. According to Microsoft,.Net will make it easier to build a Web site that consolidates this information.
ASP backers say these services are easier to use than traditionally installed software. In some cases, using an ASP can reduce costs, especially for small businesses. ASPs update clients' software automatically as patches are released, and they handle maintenance issues that IT departments would otherwise have to do.
This isn't a new idea. Before computers became inexpensive enough for consumers and small businesses, renting was a common strategy for obtaining computer access. "We've seen the return of time-sharing in some funny way," Cerf says. "Web browsers have become the character terminals of the 21st century. That was the way people did time-sharing with the big mainframes in the 1970s. And now people are going online to connect and use Web interfaces to interact with software."
But like other Net-based services, ASPs require that you be online to access your apps. If your access is down, so are you: You won't be able to use your apps and data because they reside on servers scattered across the landscape. The big question is, are you ready to give up control of your software and music?
Even tech luminaries aren't completely ready to yield control. "I'm still a little uncomfortable with it," Cerf admits, "because I'm offline enough of the time that I would like to have the software running on my PC."
Still, we've been subscribing to offline services for a long time now. As Dyson puts it, "People are used to renting cars and renting hotel rooms. Subscribing is more the concept. You have this service, you can get a premium package or a simple package, and it's yours to use."
To make all of this work, you must be able to access the Net wherever you need it. If you could listen to streaming music in the car, would you care whether you owned a CD copy? If you had access to your software at the coffee shop, would you need it loaded on your hard drive?
When the wireless Web arrives, you'll never have to be disconnected again--unless you drive through a tunnel.
Trend Three: The Internet Everywhere
We've already witnessed the emergence of high-speed Internet connections at work and at home with T1, DSL, and cable modems, all capable of 1.5-mbps data rates. This year, satellite links to the Net will approach those speeds. Couple that pace of access with a wireless LAN, and you can surf the Web comfortably from your recliner.
Already, you don't have to connect to the Web through landlines. In 1999, according to International Data Corporation, 125 million people subscribed to a wireless service--including pagers, mobile phones, and messaging services. By 2004, IDC predicts, that number will reach 207 million. We already have cell phones and PDAs that can access the Web without wires. At present, their connections run at a measly 19.2 kbps or less, but that will change. New wireless protocols will enable us to connect to the Net at high speeds. Meanwhile, other new technologies aim to eliminate the wires between the various devices you'll use--no more cords to sync your PDA to your PC. Together, these innovations will let you access the Web anywhere, anytime.
Currently in development, 3G (for third-generation) wireless will connect your cell phone, PDA, or Web tablet to the Net at speeds of up to 2 mbps--faster than a T1 line permits today. With that kind of bandwidth, you'll be able to stream CD-quality music while typing data into a database supplied by your ASP, all while riding the train on your morning commute.
But we won't see 3G in the United States for a few years yet. Tom Nyberg, a business development manager for cell phone giant Nokia, expects the first 3G networks to arrive in Europe this year and looks for the technology to hit the States in 2002, with widespread use in 2003.
Cliff Raskind, a senior analyst for wireless data and computing at Strategy Analytics, thinks that timetable is optimistic. "We don't believe 3G will get a significant foothold until 2006 or 2007," he says. In the meantime, an interim technology, called 2.5G, should arrive; it will support data rates of about 100 kbps. Raskind says that the real speed of 3G wireless will be about 384 kbps, far below the advertised maximum of 2 mbps, "unless you're standing next to a base station."
A more familiar new technology, Bluetooth, will cut the wires between your PC, your notebook, and your PDA. This short-range wireless technology can connect devices via radio waves across distances of up to 30 feet at 1 mbps, with no line of sight needed. Bluetooth permits you to sync your PDA with your PC as soon as you enter the 30-foot range.
Instead of looking for a phone jack in an airport or hotel, you'll walk into a Bluetooth-enabled zone and your notebook or PDA will be connected. This will transform the Net. Dyson says, "It will become much more like a service--like electricity. You don't plan on turning on the lights; you just switch them on."
Cerf expects constant connectivity to change how we use the Web as well. "A lot of people use the Net now as an information source," he says. "A few years from now people interested in sports events will turn to the Net instead of TV or radio. That will be quite a shift."
Of course, 3G is years away. And the more people who use wireless in your area, the slower your connection will be. An even bigger shift will happen once broadband reaches every corner of the globe: It will change what you see on your screen and how you interact with the Net.
Trend Four: The Evolving Interface
How will the Web work and look? On your PC, it will be a graphics-intensive environment, overflowing with 3D and video. On your mobile device, it will take a more space-efficient form that gives you location-sensitive information. And with either machine, you'll soon be using voice commands to go from site to site.
Getting to the Web of the future from the Web we have now may involve reducing the role of the traditional Web browser. Instead of serving as your sole Web interface, the browser will share time with smaller, application-specific programs that focus on doing one thing well.
Bruce Tognazzini, a specialist in interface design who has worked with Apple and Sun Microsystems, says that the browser is a one-trick pony: "Browsers do simple browsing very well, but they are poor at the many advanced tasks they are being called upon to do. They lack powers enjoyed by the most primitive 1970s programming languages."
So look for specialized applications to augment the browser. Napster, for example, sets up a peer-to-peer connection between computers--a task browsers would have an awful time accomplishing. Other applications may work without any input from you. Let's say you need a new driver for a scanner you just bought. A small PC maintenance application could recognize that you don't have it, find it on the Web, and install it. All you'll have to do is say, "Go."
And you will say it, because you'll be able to execute basic functions by your voice instead of via a mouse and keyboard. Simple control and command functions such as up, down, and enter require a limited vocabulary. If you train an application to listen for those few words, it can recognize them with a very high degree of accuracy. Already a product from One Voice called MyIVAN surfs the Web according to your spoken commands.
Your view of the Web will depend on the device you access it on. The bigger your screen, the more graphical the interface will be. On the small screen of a cell phone, the interface will resemble the spartan content of Wireless Application Protocol sites. Nevertheless, the next-generation WAP interface should include a few more graphical elements. And when voice-recognition technology improves, it is likely to prove extremely popular in the wireless market.
On the larger screens of PCs, the graphical interface will offer users a much richer experience. High-speed connections will allow real-time, full-screen videoconferencing to replace telephone calls. And we'll enjoy better visual perspective through three-dimensional environments. Chat room participants will use avatars in a 3D world, as if each were a character in a multiplayer, multimedia role-playing game like EverQuest.
Video is already making headway on the Web, and that trend will certainly continue. The Net lets you get your news in any form you like. Thus, you can combine a quick visual summary of a story with in-depth text analysis and background audio.
Though the Net won't replace television anytime soon, TVs that accept Internet packets shouldn't be too long in arriving. A Net-enabled TV will add a participatory dimension to what is now a very passive experience. "You'll be able to take action on something you're interested in on the spot, by clicking on some place in the image," Cerf says. "[TV] will be more flexible, because you'll have more than one avenue for interacting with it."
Before it can do the jobs of TV, radio, and other media, the Net must get fatter. Tognazzini explains, "Broadband today is not broad. It's narrow. It's not up to the task for that kind of traffic." We'll need hundreds of megabits per second to transmit HDTV-quality video to billions of homes. But such transfer rates are not unheard of. Tognazzini says at Sun he worked on a video prototype of a computer that will need 1-terabyte-per-second data rates. Even now, in limited areas, Cogent Communications offers 100-mbps access over fiber-optic lines for $1000 a month. As prices decrease and the fiber-optic network grows, that level of speed should become more widespread.
Trend Five: Digital Divisions
Over the past decade, the technological haves cashed in on the Web, while the have-nots couldn't afford even to buy a PC. This digital divide has received considerable attention in the past few years: Outreach programs sprang up, and Bill Gates's family foundation donated PCs to schools and libraries. The market has chipped in, with free ISPs and cheap PCs that make access affordable to lower-income families.
And the efforts seem to be helping. A report published in October 2000 by the U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) stated that Internet access in the home had jumped from 26.2 percent in 1998 to 41.5 percent in 2000. More than 116 million U.S. residents have access to the Internet by some means, but others--including people with disabilities--remain unconnected.
Jeffrey Cole, director of UCLA's Center for Communication Policy, identifies two types of divide: one involving access to the Internet, and the other involving the ability to use what's there. "If you look at the first million people to go online, it's pretty disturbing," Cole says. "It's white, male, upper-class, and highly educated. But if you look at the last million people, it's very encouraging. More black and Latino, more female, more lower- and middle-class. So I think through free ISPs and low-cost computers, the 'access-to-technology' digital divide is going away."
But knowing how to use the Web is another issue. "Some affluent and educated people have a better sense of what to do with information, how to search for it, and how to use it," Cole says. "So we have to do more than just wire everyone for access; we have to help people learn how to use this to enhance their lives."
Cerf expects the access gap to widen briefly as we move into the next stage of the Internet. "When you have extremely rapid introduction of technology, it's going to go to the sector that can spend money first," Cerf says. "So these terrible apparent digital divides will look like they've opened up like the San Andreas Fault."
Cerf believes the market will eventually close the access divide. Still, that won't necessarily solve the gap in people's ability to use the Internet. Dyson thinks the way to close that divide is to educate children and adults on how to use technology.
The Internet of tomorrow will have to overcome its share of problems, and access is sure to be one of them. But even so, the future looks bright. The distinction between online and offline will blur as we dabble in both realms interchangeably and in concert to shop, listen to music, and run software. The Web will become easier to use, too, as we use our voices to navigate smarter Web sites. In five years we may even forget that we're using something called the Internet. It might just be a part of life.
Michael Gowan is a freelance writer based in Oakland, California.
The Future Today
Look for physical stores to become more fully integrated with online stores. With Express Pickup at CircuitCity.com, you can buy something online and pick it up at a store near you instead of having it shipped.
Don't buy, subscribe. Personable.com previews the way you might one day get all of your software. This application service provider offers subscriptions to many apps, including Office 2000 for $20 a month and ACT 2000 for $13 a month. The site also gives subscribers 10MB of storage space on its servers.
The Web is going wireless, with speeds comparable to those of DSL or cable modems. Ricochet was one of the first wireless Internet access providers, and now you can get 128-kbps service via its modem for $75 to $79 per month. The catch? It's available only in select cities.
The Web-only Politics Only show gives us a peek at the future of a Net/TV hybrid. You can watch a video stream at up to 300 kbps and follow contextual links to the left of the screen. You can also send e-mail responses to what you see, and vote in opinion polls as you watch and read.
Funded by the Benton Foundation, the Digital Divide Network brings together the latest studies on the digital divide, publishes features about people working to correct it, and includes a list of resources so you can get involved.
UCLA Internet Project's Jeffrey Cole
The Net Takes Hold
Skeptics predicted that the Internet would breed alienation and loneliness as people turn to machines for information instead of to their neighbors. Not so, says Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for Communication Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Last year, the Center began the Internet Project, an ongoing survey of the Internet revolution's effects on our lives. Cole explains how changes in the Net have changed the way we live--and perhaps empowered us in the process.
PC World: How did survey respondents view the Internet's impact?
Cole: I was surprised at how optimistic people are about technology. People believe it enhances their social and personal communication networks. People also believe that they gain political power through the Internet. They believe that it may even ultimately make the world a better place by reducing ethnic strife or even warfare as people communicate. People thought they were better informed about what was happening politically.
PCW: We've seen changes in the way that commerce on the Web works--fewer great deals, failing dot coms. What effect will those changes have on Internet users?
Cole: People are not necessarily going to the Internet because they perceive it's cheaper. They go because they can't find what they want elsewhere. They go because they don't want to shop in 12 stores. Companies that provide only a price advantage may find that business will shrink.
PCW: Will people be comfortable paying a fee to access entertainment and software, rather than buying a physical product?
Cole: If we have options, people prefer not to do that. It will require more of an adjustment. Clearly we're not going to be able to get the kind of content we want long-term for free. We have subscription models everywhere else, so I think ultimately they will work. But we'll go kicking and screaming.
PCW: How do you think widespread high-speed wireless and broadband access will affect the way we use the Web?
Cole: Broadband changes everything. People go to broadband because of speed. But speed doesn't change their entire relationship with the Internet. What changes the whole relationship is the direct connection. We found that the average household is [online] a little over an hour a day, in two or three chunks of time. When they go to broadband, not only does their use go up about 50 percent, but they're on 20 or 30 times a day. We even see access devices starting to be a kind of kitchen appliance that people walk past to check e-mail on their way to the television. Wireless broadband we can only speculate about. The U.S. is a third-world country where wireless is concerned. I wish that was only a bad joke.