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The Future of the Net
Fuzzball963 writes "Kevin Kelly has an interesting article over at Wired on the development and future of the web. In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one, and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it (PDA, smartphone,etc)." From the article: "Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine."
Didn't they say this ten years ago? Seems that every now and then somthing comes along that pulls the idiots from the woodwork. HTML, Netscape, Java, Active-X, .net etc have all been claimed as the end of desktop applications.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
All predictions of the future have been wrong. Why will this one be any different?
So you're saying that your prediction for this prediction is that this prediction will be wrong? But you say that all predictions have been wrong.
So your prediction that this prediction will be wrong is wrong.....
*head explodes*
The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice.
So you mean I can get rid of such tedious tasks as eating, sleeping, breathing, bathing, etc., etc., et al?
Viva la revolution!
Seriously though, I'm really tired of seeing people come out with predictions about how the Internet will evolve into something which will cure global ills, solve social problems, etc, etc, ad naseum!
The Internet is a tool, nothing more. And like all tools, the more powerful it is, the more dangerous it is to the individuals using it.
Whenever I hear someone predicts something for ten years in the future, I know they chose that number because
-it's too long to be demonstrably false and
-it's just short enough to seem relevant.
But yeah, this is just nonsense.
Boy, does this sound like the kind of "publish or perish" bullshit you get from academic settings.
In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one
I have heard that procecy over 10 years ago, and seen many (now failed) startups act on it. This is BS, people don't want their software and data to leave their home, even more so since most have only a limited confidence in any corporation that would offer to hold said data for them.
What's more, they don't want to be hit some-fraction-of-a-dollar per hour of word processor use, even if the deal turns out better than PC+Windows+Office financially. It's just psychological.
by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks
That alone should tell you how much this article is worth...
Anyway, the future of the net is clear: the corporate world will gets its hands on it more and more, as it has with radio and TV, until gradually nothing on it is truly free (as in speech) anymore. That much is obvious.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Microsoft killed the software cycle. When computers weren't so widespread and when their purposes were limited, it was easy to "reset" OSes. Right now, we depend too much on our OSes to throw them away and start over. If it wasn't for the backwards-compatibility sake, the x86 architecture would be dead, Win32 would be dead, IPv4 would be dead, etc. It's one thing to lose your spreadsheet and word processing program, but we're not talking about that anymore. Too many things rely on the OSes we are using right now. I doubt we'll see a reset in the future, it will be more like a "soft transition" (9x-NT, anyone?).
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I find it funny that Wired writes these kinds of articles, yet they also wrote one about the amazing innacuracy of futurists.
Okay, I made my irony statement, but what I think Wired is lacking is a good frame of reference. I think that a lot of their predictions (and even parts of this one) could be possible (keywords: could be) by 2015, but the real question is whether they will be implemented or not. For example, we've all seen how much more efficient standards based web design is, but there are still certain entities (Microsoft) holding it back for one reason or another and this happens on many levels for many reasons.
Even a lot of the parent posts predictions could happen by 2015, but whether they actually will happen is something else entirely. A lot of large organizations have proven themselves, over time, to be remarkably stagnant despite the obvious benefits otherwise.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
C'mon people. At least try to read between the lines. He's not trying to make an exact prediction of what's to come. He talking like a dreamer of what could be. He believes it's possible and phrases it as straight fact to drive the point harder.
Lighten up. It's not a news article. It's an opinion, a different view of the world.
Developers: We can use your help.
"Haven't you noticed? The computer industry likes to do this "reset" of software every 5-10 years. We get really far feature and stability wise with one platform and then BAM! Along comes a new environment and then we start the cycle of making new spreadsheets, word processors, etc."
Nah! This is totally bogus. UNIX is ancient, TCP/IP is nearly as old. They've ruled the realm of 'real computers' and 'real networks' forever; and they are only becoming more prevelant - not less.
The "reset" is only on cheap consumer-side junk. Today's PC with Windows is yesterdays Commodore 128.
Every hard-core researcher, student, and hacker I know uses a UNIX derivative (since Mac OS/X now counts).
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
The most obvious reason is, of course, easy (perhaps "easier" is appropriate) cross-platform deployment. Another is more convenience for the user. Sure, it may be harder to use webmail compared to conventional mail apps, but it follows me where I go.
From the software publisher side, webapps are inhernetly better than desktop apps. You don't get my code (the code that matters, anyways), you have to agree to my terms, it is inherently subscription based, updates are global and unified, and tech support is easier.
We have all these elaborate and evil copyright laws to give us what webapps inherently give us. While webapps currently suffer from technical limitiations, these will eventually be solved. It is not unimaginable to see something like Photoshop as a webapp in 5-10 years.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
And according to all those Popular Science cover stories from the 1960s we should be commuting to work with jet packs or rocket boots by now.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Insert witty sig here.
In the computer world, dumb terminals are the "wave of the future" that will never materialize and will also never die. It's not hard to think of advantages to thin-client systems, like centralized support and little to no installation, but there are significant hurdles that must be overcome to make dumb terminals desirable. First, internet connections would need to be wireless, extremely fast, cheap, reliable, secure, and basically taken for granted much like breathable air. We are a long way from this point.
At the moment, there will always be at least that one application for everyone that requires local processing and storage so a fully functional computer will be needed. Who would want to be without their applications during a network outage, so they'll keep everything local just because they can. Also, network computing, thin clients, dumb terminals, whatever need to become cost effective. Nobody wants to effectively rent a computer for the same price or more than they would pay to buy it. With processing and storage getting better and cheaper all the time, I don't see how centralized computing will ever catch up from a cost perspective.
In short, network computing has many advantages that are outweighed by many disadvantages and for this reason I don't see it becoming practical or widespread anytime soon, or anytime at all for that matter.
And 5 years ago it was all going to be 'Push'.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Microsoft?
Google?
My point is that the biggest consistent problem with Wired's predictions about the Internet over the last (pause for dramatic effect) is that they ignore the economic realities. Who pays for this wonderful infrastructure? I'm not talking about the apps. He waxes poetic about us all developing those as we use Flickr. I'm talking about the actual physical infrastructure and the protocols that hold it all together.
If it is government-developed, which government is going to do the developing? The US? Given the current state of American skepticism toward anything non-military that the government builds, I'd say no. China? Perhaps, but they don't want a system that allows that sort of freedom. Nobody else has the muscle to do it, save the EU, and we all can see they have bigger issues to deal with, like whether they'll be around in ten years.
If it is being developed by a corporation or collection of corporations, how do they make money creating infastructure improvements? After the Great Fiber Bungle of the dot-com era, I don't see any of the telecoms lining up to throw down the big money for something like this, particularly given that they're too engaged in their own marketshare battles to collaborate on anything this vast.
The Internet is an oddity, in that it was originated through American government spending during the Cold War, popularized because of a British researcher who developed the Web, and accelerated due to massive commercial speculation. I think Kevin Kelly's dream of a future Internet is great, but I think it disregards the fundamentally commercial nature of the existing Internet.
Given that changes to the fundamental infrastructure of the Net require far more deliberation, cooperation, and investment than changes that occur in the server and client realm, I think we'll still be talking about convergence and a fully-integrated, always-on Internet ten years from now.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The computer is the ultimate general purpose device that can simulate just about anything you can imagine (with the right hardware attached to it).
I don't want to do all of my work on a phone sized device - be that writing, developing software or surfing the web.
I do agree that more back-end storage will be remotely accessible via the web (for example, I keep my writings at home on an internal website that I access and create through an http client application (browser for the uninitiated) from any computer connected to my network.
That being said, there will always be applications that will need to run on the local machine for various purposes:
1. Video games. I can't imagine loading a video game binary image from across the internet every time I want to play it; load times are long enough when it is on the local box as it is. Also how would fees for this service be structured? I can justify a one-time cost for a client side app, and maybe even small fees for MMOG game access - but a per-use fee would be very bad on my pocketbook.
2. Plugins and enhancements to http clients. Again, there are certain things that a backend process running on a server will not be able to do as quickly as a front-end application running on the client.
3. Number crunching and software development. The very nature of the web makes the least common denominator the most common choices available. Moving all development off to the server would mean the loss of customization choices currently available to local developers. Additionally, I don't see companies providing the free CPU cycles to do any significant general purpose number crunching (without charging a hefty fee, of course).
Finally, a general purpose computer with standards based interfaces (PCI, AGP, USB, Firewire etc) allows much more flexibility for upgrading and extending the functionality of the device almost indefinitely. Specialized devices are too limited - while useful in their problem domain - these devices will not serve as the only means of delivering applications to users - particularly when we talk about the complexity of some of the key computer science problems before us.
Lets assume that the prediction is correct. I can see a time when only a few die-hards would have the computing power that is generally available today. That means your average person would be losing out on opportunities to define their own 'digital destiny' - essentially falling back into that 'producer/consumer' pattern (where producers are exclusively corporations, and consumers are the rest of us collectively) - while a few of us enjoy our freedom in quiet corners of the network. Now that I think about it, it might not be that bad after all...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
It's a prediction, and not a very good one. Here's a better prediction, the rise of the household file server - for more than just us geeks. People will need and want a central repository for their digital photos, music, recorded TV for watching later. While it will be all about the network, it will be more about the home network than the internet. Spam and viruses will continue to be an arms race. The advances in computing power will be eaten up by flashy graphics and the amount of time it takes to check a file against 1.7 million virus signatures. So all in all, I don't see a huge change except for maybe some legal and patent issues slowly clearing up.
bance.net
My predictions are always right but nobody bothers listening to me. Just cus idiots make bad predicitons doesn't mean all predictions are bad. This guys predicition is mostly right which is evident because most of it's already happened.
The biggest wrong point in this prediction is that we're building an AI. WRONG! The Internet isn't a network of machines. It's a network of people. The machines just accelerate the existing network that already existes among humans. We're forming a super species out of ourselves. As neurons are to brains so are we to the Internet. We've learned to grow faster more far reaching connections so now our global brain can think faster and better.
As such the thing to watch for is to greater intergration of portal network access devices into our daily lifes. Cell phones and PDAs are kids toys compared to the devices we will be seeing. Expect to have free, and fast, net access everywhere and to see everyone using it. THAT is what is going to happen. Our links will be always on every where we go and the flow will be two way rather than downstream-mostly as it is now.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.