Technology stabilization on the Internet can happen at several levels. The most fundamental is mostly invisible to users: transmission protocols, hardware infrastructure, that sort of thing. That's the equivalent of railroads needing to use the same gauge in order to switch cars from one line to another, and has mostly already happened.
The next level has to do with data formats: how does the receiving device know what it's getting? How do you squeeze words, pictures, sound, and other kinds of data down the same pipe? At some point, a given format (HTML for words, possibly MP3 for audio, who knows what for video) will gain critical mass and no further innovation will be possible or desirable.
I disagree, by the way, that the world wants a real-time, full-motion, audio/video-based system. I've got broadband now, but very rarely bother with sites that depend on multimedia. If I want information, reading is faster. If I want entertainment, I've got a TV, a stereo, and a DVD player. Early web+TV combinations have not been terribly impressive.
Similarly, at some point a last-mile solution will gain critical mass and people will stop thinking about it, just as they long ago stopped thinking about their telephones, electricity, and plumbing.
I'm not convinced that the world is screaming for wireless access, either. Devices small enough to be portable have some pretty serious usability limitations for all but highly targeted services (messaging, traffic reports, that kind of thing). And for heavy duty web use, even a 56K landline is barely fast enough, and that's much faster than most of the wireless choices.
Except for a small fraction of early adopters, people generally won't buy technology just because it exists. It has to be "better" than the existing alternatives in some way. Blackberry has been successful because it's better (more versatile, more portable) than a text pager. Palm OS has been successful because it's better (more portable) than a paper planner. I have yet to see an application that convinces me that wireless web is better.
Katherine |
