The telephone still connects continents more effectively. This imbalance between America and the rest of the world means that the Internet's potential role as a global medium was barely apparent. At the start of the new century, more than half the Internet's users were already outside the United States, but America still had by far the largest number of users as a share of regional population. 26 This extraordinary quality will grow more important as the rest of the world starts to catch up with the United States. "There has never been a commercial technology like this in the history of the world, whereby from the minute you adopt it, it forces you to think and act globally," says Robert Hormats, deputy chairman of Goldman Sachs International. It has, however, three particularly important characteristics. In another, it is a laboratory for communications in the future. The Internet is, in one sense, merely an enormously efficient way to transport digital data around the world. Above all, until people cease to be aware of it as something special and complicated, it will not have found its fortune It must combine the quality of service of the telephone with the fun of television, at prices that rival those of both. For the Internet to reach maturity, it must be as accessible to a grandmother as to a geek. The next few years will show the extent to which the answers to these questions can emerge without diminishing the Internet's original exuberance. The other is how it will be reached and where the main power to deliver services will reside.
#Fame and obscurity how to#
One is how to pay for it and the services it offers. As uses for the Internet multiply, two issues matter. It offers a peek at the communications future: a world in which transmitting information costs almost nothing, in which distance is irrelevant, and in which any amount of content is instantly accessible-but only a peek, for the Internet is merely a prototype for something more sophisticated. An open conduit, it is capable of transmitting anything that can be put into digital form. Instead, it has many uses, including carrying telephone calls and television programs.
Unlike the telephone and television, however, the Internet has no established principal use. The Internet has benefited from the technological revolutions that have slashed the cost of delivering telephone calls and television programs and multiplied the capacity of both types of network.
Watching its evolution, we can catch a glimpse of what lies ahead. The Internet thus functions as both a prototype and a testing ground for the future of communications. All sorts of experiments, carried out on the Internet, will feed through into other media, changing and developing them.
The Internet is thus a global laboratory, allowing individuals as well as the marketing departments of multinationals and academics in top universities to pioneer uses for communications technology. Never in history have so many entrepreneurs attempted, in so short a time, to develop uses for an innovation. But others will transform communications, commerce, and companies.
#Fame and obscurity torrent#
Many of the astonishing torrent of ideas and business plans unleashed by the Internet will turn out to be junk. In addition, the Internet has also created a host of new businesses (some of them evanescent) with exotic names such as Flyswat, Mambo, Egg, Google an army of new millionaires (some of them temporary) a stock market boom (and bust) and, above all, the most concentrated burst of innovation the world has ever seen. Yet by 2000, perhaps 385 million people around the world had acquired a new way to communicate, and a new global source on information on a giant scale. Even In 1997, when France's President Jacques Chirac opened his country's new national library and was shown a computer "mouse," he gazed at the curiosity in wonder. In 1990, only a few academics had heard of the Internet. Never has any new invention shot from obscurity to global fame in quite this way.
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