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."

Comments

Didn't they say this ten years ago?

[Kenja]

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.

Re:Didn't they say this ten years ago?

[toddbu]

Or the marketing guys. Seriously, isn't this how Microsoft works? Paint a rosy picture of the future and then tell everybody to hang onto their cash and avoid buying competing products until you can get one from "someone you trust" who obviously has enough foresight to predict the future years in advance. I had to laugh when I saw the recent pictures of Microsoft execs pumping up a room full of people while showing off Vista. You'd think that they'd just cured cancer. Now just wait until sometime late in 2006 and you too can live in a better world.

Re:Riiiiiiight

[hawkeye_82]

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*

"Ten Years"

[pojo]

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.

Bullshit from Academia

[greenmars]

Boy, does this sound like the kind of "publish or perish" bullshit you get from academic settings.

Re:The Software Reset

[mpontes]

That reminds me of an article I read in a magazine 5 years ago. It also talked about the 5 year OS cycle and predicted that everyone would be using Linux in 2005.

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?).

Re:Riiiiiiight

[truthsearch]

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.