IBM researcher and prognosticator, Stuart Feldman:
IBD: What will be happening on the Web in 20 years?Feldman: You'll see many more of the big macro shifts you're already seeing. Big industries will not only change how they do certain things, but who does them. The definition of what business you're in will start shifting. The meaning of industrial sectors will start changing.
IBD: Can you give an example?
Feldman: In the airline industry, the meaning of what constitutes an airline will change. In 20 years, it will be harder to say if airlines are the people that fly planes, or those who do the computer processing that make the flight possible, or the people that market these flights.
IBD: What do you mean?
Feldman: A single company won't be running an airline. An airline could be made up of several different companies, many of them Web-based. The people that organize the trips won't be the same people that run the planes.
An interesting, if somewhat jargony, look into what is obviously a long and prosperous life ahead of interconnectivity. Six years ago a class I took in Modernism spent a session on the internet — it was quite new in 1998, a repository for goofy fansites, barely used as a medium for commerce and unknown to a great number of Americans, as I had only been introduced to it two years before. As I recall, the tenor of the discussion was probing and tentative; nobody really knew what the internet's potential was, while at the same time the intellectual exchange was still saturated with dystopian fears of losing humanity to electronica. "What good is the internet?" went the professor's question. I answered: it had provided me with more than enough. That school year I was spending great amounts of spare time cobbling together electronic music on my computer. Many of my samples were collected around campus — miking myself banging on metal, clicking wet canvas, pushing sturdy drafting tables across linoleum, the usual — but a notable portion of them were stock samples or loops. I'd start at an audio forum and run through links until I found myself at FTP caches or web catalogs, and download sizeable zipped files of fifty or more rhythm and percussion sounds. Where else could I have found them for free? I can't say — the computing market hadn't produced any discrete, inexpensive, high-capacity media like today's compact discs at that point. I didn't know any people around campus who shared my hobby, much less a tempermental Zip drive.
Frankly, if it weren't for the internet, I could not have accomplished what I did. So I answered that despite all the social, technical and financial pitfalls of the "World Wide Web," as it was marketed in those days, my access to needed tools was more direct than any other known arrangement. "In my line of work," I said, "the internet empowers the individual. It empowers the individual." Decentralization was the vanishing point on networking's horizon then, and is still now. That bodes well for all of us, particularly for trailblazers like Feldman.