WWW8 Notes - Predictions Continued

Bob Metcalfe

Bob Metcalfe, founder of 3COM, is infamous for his predictions - and also infamous for the stunts he'll pull if they fail to come through. (In 1996, when the Internet did not suffer the major outages he predicted in 1995, he ate the paper on which he'd written his predictions - as promised.) In his keynote speech at WWW8, Metcalfe started out with some fairly tame, and fairly believable, predictions:

• the semantic web will become a reality (eventually)
• high-speed net access will become a reality (fairly soon)
• we will pay as we go on the Internet - advertising won't work as a revenue model

These are all visions which will take more than the year that has passed to come true, and not that controversial. To liven things up, though, Metcalfe made seven more specific predictions which can be judged now:

On November 8th, 1999, the stock market bubble will burst.

Wrong. The stock market bubble didn't burst on November 8th; it wasn't until the year 2000 that a tech meltdown occurred, and even so, the damage was somewhat selective, with many mediocre Net companies continuing to hang in there on the market. (Of course, nobody expected Metcalfe to get the date right, but he was rather specific...)

Y2K will be a nonevent

Correct. In the sense that he meant it - that we wouldn't have catastrophic computer or societal failures - Metcalfe was right; because of a combination of hard work across the industry, plus decisions to finally upgrade decades-old hardware and software, we survived.

"Pretty soon you're going to find drugstores serving cappucino"

Wrong. The theory was that because you'd be able to shop for anything online, real-world stores would need something better to draw in customers to their stores. As it turns out, being able to see and feel products have kept customers from abandoning bricks-and-mortar storefronts for Internet shopping. That, plus the problems online retailers have had with home delivery.

In 1999 ... the direct access internet will begin its deployment and into the millions; multimegabit, and always on.

Correct. DSL, once thought an also-ran, is making large strides; and there are plenty of customers who are happy with their cable modem access. There are millions of customers with always-on, megabit access to the Internet - but many millions more without.

The growth of the Internet will drop from annual doublings to less than 100% a year

Correct. Internet growth is still high, but growth is limited by how much people are willing to spend on computers and connections.

Open Source - "I predict it's going to fizzle."

Wrong. Open-source software is still going strong, from the perspective of both developer mindshare and money spent (on support, service, and - yes - software). Of course, closed-source software is still selling well too. Perhaps there's room for both.

"A gigalapse of the Internet will occur before the end of the year 2000."

Unknown. We've still got 5 months for a single event to cause a network outage costing 1 billion user hours. But enough has gone wrong to demonstrate the point of Metcalfe's prediction: there's a lot that can go wrong with the Internet - and does.

Edward Piou is an ahref.com producer and runs ep Productions, Inc., a development company based in the Washington, D.C. area.

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