The Internet? Yeah!
In February 1995 Newsweek ran an article called “The Internet? Bah!” from computer scientist Clifford Stoll wherein he predicted that the Internet would never amount to anything and that no one would every really be able to communicate, learn or do business on it. What a difference a decade makes!
Looking back on his article, he wasn’t really wrong, not with world of 1995, but what he wasn’t predicting was the entrepreneurs that would to challenge all of his assumptions about how we use the Internet by finding real needs and filling them.
In this post, I’m going to quote some of his text and then highlight businesses that didn’t exist in 1995 that are doing exactly what he predicted they wouldn’t be doing.
Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
Blogger was the first popular weblogging software that made it even easier to be “heard” online than it was in 1995. Is anyone listening? Are you reading this blog? Of course you are. You and a hundred thousand other people are reading this post right now.
How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book.
The strong early sales of Amazon’s Kindle refute this.
What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data.
Google has done what no librarian ever could. They’ve made it incredibly easy for anyone to find information about everything. Yes, some of that information is raw and perhaps even wrong, but so little effort is required to check facts and sources, that there’s no real negative impact from unfiltered data.
Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument.
One word: Wikipedia.
Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.
Ron Paul raised 4.3 million dollars online in one day.
Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past?
YouTube has taken the short film strip and made it relevant again. Sure, that short clip about plate tectonics meant nothing to you after watching it half-awake one afternoon after lunch in 10th grade. But, when you can go and watch it again today, you’ll be surprised at what you can pick up.
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Look at this list of the top 10 sellers online. It’s everything Stoll predicts won’t sell online:
- Travel
- Computer hardware
- Office
- Consumer electronics
- Books
- Event tickets
- Home and garden
- Health and beauty
- Sport and fitness
- Movies and video
What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact.
How many followers do you have on Twitter, MyBlogLog community members, Facebook and Myspace buddies?
I get a couple hundred mails a day from real people with real lives, real ideas and real questions, all because of this silly little blog. How’s that not human contact?
My point, of course, in all of this is not stop trying to predict the future, but to find a niche now and fill it.
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