10 Predictions for Year 2000
01/01/2000
by Edward Piou
The world didn't end at 12:01am on January 1, 2000, GMT (or any other time). Since the big question mark many people have worried about has been erased, it's almost safe to bring out some predictions for the coming year...
- Netscape Navigator 5.0 will be officially released (obvious); but Navigator will continue to lose market share. Developers will love the browser for enforcing W3C standards; but end-users will shun it for not displaying non-standard code. The end-user generally doesn't care about standards; the end-user cares about seeing cool and useful stuff.
- The "enhancements" in Windows 2000 and Windows Millenium will look great to end users, who will appreciate the almost-seamless integration of features in the new operating system. But security problems in the Microsoft products will cause huge headaches for computer security experts and system administrators. Exploits that dwarf Melissa and Bubbleboy will make headlines.
- The Internet will have a huge impact on politics, specifically the Year 2000 elections. Not in terms of political advertising; but in terms of making campaigns more efficient and cost-effective. We'll see at least one major upset victory similar to Jesse Ventura's, in which mainstream candidates lose to a campaign that uses the Internet to run a much tighter and smoother ship.
- At the same time, political races will have a big effect on the Net. Previously-unknown websites will vault to prominence due to either insightful or interesting coverage of political races; and huge amounts of Net traffic will be taken up by political debate among normal users. Don't be surprised if half the people who send you email include a "Vote for XYZ!" in their sig file.
(Non-Net side bet: Ralph Nader grabs enough of the popular vote to make the Green Party eligible for a proportional share of public funding in 2004.)
- Whether or not Linux continues to gobble up market share, the BSDs - "the other open-source OS" - will make news, and make waves. Watch out for more from the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD crowds.
- Weblogs, or 'blogs, will go commercial - more so than they have so far, anyway. It was only by buying the open-source 'blog Slashdot.org that Andover.Net was able to get enough credibility to IPO this past fall. More corporations (and maybe political campaigns) will turn to this format to generate web traffic and revenue.
- International access - as even more non-English-speakers start using the Internet, non-English (or multi-lingual) websites will flourish, maybe even sprouting up faster than the English sites. Look especially for Spanish-language Web destinations.
- Wireless access - huge numbers of consumers in Japan, and to some degree Europe, are already using Net-enabled wireless phones and PDAs to access and manipulate information. We'll see wireless access grow here in the U.S., but it won't really take off until access costs drop precipitously.
- U.S. Net demographics - we'll see a lot more women using the web; enough that they'll be close to parity with men. The racial digital divide will, unfortunately, persist; even when comparing people in similar income brackets, whites will be more likely to own home computers and have Net access from home than blacks and Latinos.
- My final prediction - that ahref.com still wouldn't be listed in Yahoo as of December 31st, 2000 - was scuttled a few days ago (19 months after site launch). Substitute prediction: lawsuits. Trademark, domain name, patent, and copyright disputes will make building a web business a minefield, and lawyers become the some of the foremost beneficiaries of the Internet economy.
Come back in a year, and we'll see what happened. Of course, the easiest way to be reminded is to join the ahref.com newsletter.
What do you think? Got some predictions of your own? Come and put forth your own prognostications.
Edward Piou is an ahref.com producer and runs ep Productions, Inc., a development company based in the Washington, D.C. area. |
