If you are old enough, you might remember 1995 as a remarkable year for the tech industry and the “crossing the chasm” of the Internet. Yes, techies and innovators were already using the Internet, Web and Email for while, but 1995 was the start of the mainstream folks joining the parade. Between 1995 and 1999 the web changed dramatically. New HTML standards, the adoption of JavaScript, the promise of Java, the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft trying to out-innovate each other and Venture Capitalists putting piles of money on ideas, most failed, but some that changed everything, like eBay, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and more.
Fifteen years from now, we’ll look back at 2010 just like 1995. The pace of changes in technology is something I haven’t seen since the mid-90s. From the programming languages and frameworks, to the adoption of Cloud Computing, from the birth of new platforms like Facebook and services like Twitter (Twitter is not a platform yet). It’s a moment worth savoring.
Facebook and Trust
The announcements Facebook made yesterday were nothing short of extraordinary. If you look at the mid to late 90s, Microsoft was defining the trends, and lots of companies trying to play catch up. It was destroying and disrupting established business, like databases, browsers, email servers, development tools and much more and enabling partners in an amazingly valuable ecosystem. Facebook is the new Microsoft. Facebook is defining the trends and putting itself right in the middle between people and applications. It’s doing that by enabling things that weren’t possible before, were too costly for the average developer, or had tremendous distribution hurdles for it to work. Now it’s all a line of code away.
The problem that we (consumers and developers) face right now is the fact the ground is shifting. Things will fall, and they might hit you in the head. Facebook is changing protocols, APIs, terms of service, policies, UI and lots of things. Facebook didn’t get to the point that it’s stable and moving slowly to some clear direction. It’s moving fast and making 90 degrees turns. If you devise a super successful idea on top of Facebook, it might be completely destroyed by next year’s F8.
The Real Web Is Here
This Web that I see becoming a concrete thing over the next 5 years is a lot more exciting than I ever experienced in my life. It’s a web that jumped from PCs & Macs to everything – a real web! It’s exciting not only because what will become possible, but because it’s not vaporware anymore. I’ve been misled in the late 90s. Lots of promises of what was going to happen just a few years from “now”, things like Personal Assistants Devices that made your life easier, to Network Computer, and cross-platform development. It all failed on me (and you). Not anymore.
I can see my car navigation system connecting to my calendar and grabbing the next destination address automatically, and sending a note to the other party I’m on my way and running 7 minutes late. I can see news websites who will show me exactly what I want to read because it understands me from all the data available everywhere. I see my music, pictures and movies of my kids being available anywhere I want, the way I want it and make it easy to find that video scene where my kids are running on the beach in the middle of 1,000s of hours of recorded video.
My friends, the future is awesome.
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