One forecast given 15 years ago
I was reminded of this forecast by the post “15 things of today that our children will not find” .
The author of the forecast, the founder of the company "Demos" Davidov Mikhail Izgievich. The forecast was given in an article dedicated to the decade of "Demos" and published in December 1998.
I would like to bring this forecast here in order to see how accurate it turned out to be.
PS . I know that cross-hosting is not welcomed on the hub, but I could not help but cite this text in its entirety. I just allowed myself to exclude the details that were irrelevant in my opinion.
In any case, the original can be read at news.demos.su/private/demos.html
In the notes on the history of Demos, I really want to talk about the fact that everyone who read them is somehow PARTICULAR to the Internet, feed on it and think about it. And, for sure, one of these people will become the Number One star in this area.
Will it be the author of a unique program? Will it be a developer of a unique piece of iron or a unique method? Or will it be a unique businessman? I do not know. But from the comments I see - all interests come down to Internet technologies. Well, of course, the technology will constantly evolve, there will be breakthroughs, for example, such as ICQ (by the way, today it is the second distribution product after Windows).
The question, however, is that the Internet is much more than just technology. I undertake to make some strange judgments. To begin with, chicken never understands the taste of fried eggs ... and I really want to go over to the side of those who eat fried eggs ...
They will have money in the sea ... Where from? Of course, not from the sale of connections (most likely, they will connect to the Internet and use it for free, just like we are listening to the radio now), and not even from developing and maintaining websites, banners, etc. Money will come from trade and advertising. Later, money will be added from television and all entertainment ...
Some simple evidence. In the USA, there is such a company amazon.com - it just sells books and music discs (though in the database of both, it’s literally tens of millions). Well, in general, this is what we call E-commerce. Shares of this company rose in price from $ 20 to 470 in 1 year ... Now, however, they have begun to fall - overheated. Another eBay.com company (I ask you to pronounce it exactly in English :) also jumped from $ 18 to 300, in just 7 months ... Our favorite Yahoo! His shares reached $ 400 over the same year. Each month, several new companies from the Internet appear on the stock exchange, and stocks are immediately seized. What completely kills - all these companies show meager profits, or even even losses. Analysts are shocked and constantly predict fierce disappointment for investors, but stocks are rising and rising. And this is not the madness of the Americans. They have a scent. The same booms were on shares of automobile companies, manufacturers of semiconductors, computers, televisions, cell phones. And what, in fact, does the scent tell them?
ON THE INTERNET EVERYTHING IS EXPENSIVE THAN ONE IN THE STORE. Once more expensive, it means more profitable. Why is it more expensive? You came to the site and saw the meat grinder that you need. He pressed the button, paid, three days later they brought you a meat grinder home. And you won’t go to the store to compare the price! Once, and there’s no buzz ... People pay for convenience and a high choice of choice at home - such a virtual store TOTAL at home ... Americans love to pay for service (convenience), I have the feeling that there are only two businesses in the USA - service and everything, that is not a service ...
So, the Internet has fallen into the realm of American life (which means consciousness), which means that all national managers will be thrown into this area of activity - they can do it. More precisely, the manager is the foundation of American prosperity.
Where it leads? Internet in the US will belong to three or four monsters. Two or three already exist - this is AOL, WorldCom, possibly Microsoft, but not by itself, but represented by Teledesic (this is ZAO (LLC), individual Bill G. has about 35% of the shares there). Three or four years (maybe faster), these monsters will "paint" America (both north and south), then they will come to Europe and buy everything there (according to my calculations, Europe now even lags behind Russia, I mean the Internet) and CAN LOOK IN RUSSIA - a handful of small millionaires (about 5 - 10 people) will remain from our providers ...
The next phase of managers' participation is the transformation of the Internet into McDonald's! - a typical site, a typical site, a typical voice of the person on duty on the phone - about clothes, advertising, etc. I am not talking.
And this is for reflection, gentlemen programmers - try to introduce a new dish at McDonald's. No, we set a smaller task - try adding a button to the janitor's suit ... Russian bureaucrats will seem like small beggars to you - you will get, as V. Antonov put it, “American scoop” and keep in mind that “everything is great in Texas”!
Add a table processor to the browser, the rest is there and flash it into a chip worth $ 20. Well, almost Nintendo!
Such a crap completely kills the OS on personal computers (by the way, look at Netscape's Gecko). Why do you need a personal computer when they give you a personal page on the site ... And on this site there are everything and software packages and databases and multimedia - uploaded and rejoice. We add that all the software is always in an up-to-date state ... and you can immediately get advice on any program (ICQ). Why buy Microsoft Office for $ 400, when you can rent it online for ridiculous money ... Nah, I didn’t come up with anything. Watch out for National Semiconductor. They bought in Israel a company that developed a hybrid analog-to-digital integrated circuit - the whole PC in one chip. The chip is smaller than PII, standard connectors take up more space (so the standards will change). We always knew
Programmers have just really gotten to the object (object-oriented programs) - in analog machines it was simply impossible otherwise - now, really, everything is new, this is a well-forgotten old ...
No router - no internet. Then Vadim Antonov can read 200 hours of lectures. So far, Cisco has been collecting money in heaps in this place (she bought 3COM) and something is not visible to competitors. Any fresh idea in this business - millions of dollars in profit ...
Fig with A4 TFT screen, with integrated radio modem - her photo has already appeared in Popular Scince N2, 1999 (www.popsci.com). Do not think that there aren’t enough frequencies (there is white noise and orthogonal polynomials), don’t think that it’s expensive - I know it from Beeline, every new cell phone in the second hundred thousand is cheaper than the wired one - there’s no “last mile” cost - in cable telephony costs for the last mile are growing in proportion to the number of telephone sets, in the radio and cellular telephony they simply do not.
Believe me, I have, in my opinion, two copyright certificates for information compression devices. See, Gates has invested in Teledesic. Do not think that this is a new company - it is already more than eight years old ... During this time, the company spent about three billion dollars on research and development. And the founders of the company are not weak - Boeing, Motorola, Gates, McCoy, some Saudi sheikh and the company’s task is “very simple” - to give 2 megabits / second to the Internet user anywhere in the world (the poles are excluded, however) exactly as much as digital television needs ... What did they say about back-bones? Yes, and it will die as unnecessary. In order not to distract you with the Teledesic story, go to www.teledesic.com there, by the way, you can get a job - they take everyone who is worth something ... In this regard, it is advisable to pay attention to how NT develops - for Gates, Microsoft has only one way to survive - to make NT the main node system - why does it need so much money, where does he put it, and when will our racketeers get to it?
Banks will buy the Internet or the Internet will buy banks? Now the stock and financial markets and the technology of working in them are changing. Powerful, well-organized electronic traders of paper, money, gold, etc. appeared. All mutual funds, brokerage companies are experiencing a severe crisis of customer confidence.
THE CLIENT NOW MYSELF CAN GIVE ORDERS FOR PURCHASE AND SALE OF PAPER, form the investment portfolio itself, work in real time of the exchange, which was previously inaccessible to him. For example, the electronic broker E * Trade (www.etrade.com) in 1998 alone gained about 600 thousand customers (Schwab has a million 600 thousand), each of them pays $ 20 per transaction. About one fifth (approx. 100 thousand) work actively - from one to five transactions per day - in other words, the company receives from each of them about $ 50 per day! This is only part of the income. Clients keep their money and stocks with an electronic broker, he, in turn, works like a regular bank - as they say, he “twists money”, lends to clients for stocks, etc. So what, you say. But that. An electronic broker has a profit greater than ordinary banks!
Clinton and Gore themselves put a twisted pair at school - this was seen by all of America. Why's that? Talk to any image maker - he will confirm - election success depends on individual preference - there is motivation - they will elect Zhirinovsky to be the US president. If every family has access to the Internet, then there are tremendous opportunities for forming motives for voter behavior. Politicians have already understood this. We are the first - Nemtsov. Why am I writing about this - ISPs will intercept part of the budgets of election companies for themselves, later they will dictate terms to politicians ... put forward their own, "suppress" strangers ...
The more sites, the higher the entropy - fumbling information - this is a headache for a 21st century person. I can say that any work aimed at reducing the entropy of the network has a chance of prosperity. Search engines of the modern type do not solve the problem. We need means of searching for information on fuzzy queries, we need robots-information cleaners, we need personal means of updating data. The Internet will be useful only when it is clean and everything is put in order ...
Davidov
December, 1998
The author of the forecast, the founder of the company "Demos" Davidov Mikhail Izgievich. The forecast was given in an article dedicated to the decade of "Demos" and published in December 1998.
I would like to bring this forecast here in order to see how accurate it turned out to be.
PS . I know that cross-hosting is not welcomed on the hub, but I could not help but cite this text in its entirety. I just allowed myself to exclude the details that were irrelevant in my opinion.
In any case, the original can be read at news.demos.su/private/demos.html
The Internet. Fantasies on the subject
In the notes on the history of Demos, I really want to talk about the fact that everyone who read them is somehow PARTICULAR to the Internet, feed on it and think about it. And, for sure, one of these people will become the Number One star in this area.
Will it be the author of a unique program? Will it be a developer of a unique piece of iron or a unique method? Or will it be a unique businessman? I do not know. But from the comments I see - all interests come down to Internet technologies. Well, of course, the technology will constantly evolve, there will be breakthroughs, for example, such as ICQ (by the way, today it is the second distribution product after Windows).
The question, however, is that the Internet is much more than just technology. I undertake to make some strange judgments. To begin with, chicken never understands the taste of fried eggs ... and I really want to go over to the side of those who eat fried eggs ...
1. All media (radio, newspapers, magazines, television) will fall into the hands of ISP
They will have money in the sea ... Where from? Of course, not from the sale of connections (most likely, they will connect to the Internet and use it for free, just like we are listening to the radio now), and not even from developing and maintaining websites, banners, etc. Money will come from trade and advertising. Later, money will be added from television and all entertainment ...
Some simple evidence. In the USA, there is such a company amazon.com - it just sells books and music discs (though in the database of both, it’s literally tens of millions). Well, in general, this is what we call E-commerce. Shares of this company rose in price from $ 20 to 470 in 1 year ... Now, however, they have begun to fall - overheated. Another eBay.com company (I ask you to pronounce it exactly in English :) also jumped from $ 18 to 300, in just 7 months ... Our favorite Yahoo! His shares reached $ 400 over the same year. Each month, several new companies from the Internet appear on the stock exchange, and stocks are immediately seized. What completely kills - all these companies show meager profits, or even even losses. Analysts are shocked and constantly predict fierce disappointment for investors, but stocks are rising and rising. And this is not the madness of the Americans. They have a scent. The same booms were on shares of automobile companies, manufacturers of semiconductors, computers, televisions, cell phones. And what, in fact, does the scent tell them?
ON THE INTERNET EVERYTHING IS EXPENSIVE THAN ONE IN THE STORE. Once more expensive, it means more profitable. Why is it more expensive? You came to the site and saw the meat grinder that you need. He pressed the button, paid, three days later they brought you a meat grinder home. And you won’t go to the store to compare the price! Once, and there’s no buzz ... People pay for convenience and a high choice of choice at home - such a virtual store TOTAL at home ... Americans love to pay for service (convenience), I have the feeling that there are only two businesses in the USA - service and everything, that is not a service ...
So, the Internet has fallen into the realm of American life (which means consciousness), which means that all national managers will be thrown into this area of activity - they can do it. More precisely, the manager is the foundation of American prosperity.
2. So, the Internet is becoming the place of application of the forces of the most powerful industry in the United States - managers
Where it leads? Internet in the US will belong to three or four monsters. Two or three already exist - this is AOL, WorldCom, possibly Microsoft, but not by itself, but represented by Teledesic (this is ZAO (LLC), individual Bill G. has about 35% of the shares there). Three or four years (maybe faster), these monsters will "paint" America (both north and south), then they will come to Europe and buy everything there (according to my calculations, Europe now even lags behind Russia, I mean the Internet) and CAN LOOK IN RUSSIA - a handful of small millionaires (about 5 - 10 people) will remain from our providers ...
The next phase of managers' participation is the transformation of the Internet into McDonald's! - a typical site, a typical site, a typical voice of the person on duty on the phone - about clothes, advertising, etc. I am not talking.
And this is for reflection, gentlemen programmers - try to introduce a new dish at McDonald's. No, we set a smaller task - try adding a button to the janitor's suit ... Russian bureaucrats will seem like small beggars to you - you will get, as V. Antonov put it, “American scoop” and keep in mind that “everything is great in Texas”!
3. The Internet will kill PC ... and, of course, Windows. In any case, it will be a different Windows ...
Add a table processor to the browser, the rest is there and flash it into a chip worth $ 20. Well, almost Nintendo!
Such a crap completely kills the OS on personal computers (by the way, look at Netscape's Gecko). Why do you need a personal computer when they give you a personal page on the site ... And on this site there are everything and software packages and databases and multimedia - uploaded and rejoice. We add that all the software is always in an up-to-date state ... and you can immediately get advice on any program (ICQ). Why buy Microsoft Office for $ 400, when you can rent it online for ridiculous money ... Nah, I didn’t come up with anything. Watch out for National Semiconductor. They bought in Israel a company that developed a hybrid analog-to-digital integrated circuit - the whole PC in one chip. The chip is smaller than PII, standard connectors take up more space (so the standards will change). We always knew
Programmers have just really gotten to the object (object-oriented programs) - in analog machines it was simply impossible otherwise - now, really, everything is new, this is a well-forgotten old ...
4. The most promising piece of hardware is a router
No router - no internet. Then Vadim Antonov can read 200 hours of lectures. So far, Cisco has been collecting money in heaps in this place (she bought 3COM) and something is not visible to competitors. Any fresh idea in this business - millions of dollars in profit ...
5. The Internet will become mobile
Fig with A4 TFT screen, with integrated radio modem - her photo has already appeared in Popular Scince N2, 1999 (www.popsci.com). Do not think that there aren’t enough frequencies (there is white noise and orthogonal polynomials), don’t think that it’s expensive - I know it from Beeline, every new cell phone in the second hundred thousand is cheaper than the wired one - there’s no “last mile” cost - in cable telephony costs for the last mile are growing in proportion to the number of telephone sets, in the radio and cellular telephony they simply do not.
6. All push technology and IP telephony from poverty and from the evil - everything will die ...
Believe me, I have, in my opinion, two copyright certificates for information compression devices. See, Gates has invested in Teledesic. Do not think that this is a new company - it is already more than eight years old ... During this time, the company spent about three billion dollars on research and development. And the founders of the company are not weak - Boeing, Motorola, Gates, McCoy, some Saudi sheikh and the company’s task is “very simple” - to give 2 megabits / second to the Internet user anywhere in the world (the poles are excluded, however) exactly as much as digital television needs ... What did they say about back-bones? Yes, and it will die as unnecessary. In order not to distract you with the Teledesic story, go to www.teledesic.com there, by the way, you can get a job - they take everyone who is worth something ... In this regard, it is advisable to pay attention to how NT develops - for Gates, Microsoft has only one way to survive - to make NT the main node system - why does it need so much money, where does he put it, and when will our racketeers get to it?
7. Who will buy whom?
Banks will buy the Internet or the Internet will buy banks? Now the stock and financial markets and the technology of working in them are changing. Powerful, well-organized electronic traders of paper, money, gold, etc. appeared. All mutual funds, brokerage companies are experiencing a severe crisis of customer confidence.
THE CLIENT NOW MYSELF CAN GIVE ORDERS FOR PURCHASE AND SALE OF PAPER, form the investment portfolio itself, work in real time of the exchange, which was previously inaccessible to him. For example, the electronic broker E * Trade (www.etrade.com) in 1998 alone gained about 600 thousand customers (Schwab has a million 600 thousand), each of them pays $ 20 per transaction. About one fifth (approx. 100 thousand) work actively - from one to five transactions per day - in other words, the company receives from each of them about $ 50 per day! This is only part of the income. Clients keep their money and stocks with an electronic broker, he, in turn, works like a regular bank - as they say, he “twists money”, lends to clients for stocks, etc. So what, you say. But that. An electronic broker has a profit greater than ordinary banks!
8. We will vote at home
Clinton and Gore themselves put a twisted pair at school - this was seen by all of America. Why's that? Talk to any image maker - he will confirm - election success depends on individual preference - there is motivation - they will elect Zhirinovsky to be the US president. If every family has access to the Internet, then there are tremendous opportunities for forming motives for voter behavior. Politicians have already understood this. We are the first - Nemtsov. Why am I writing about this - ISPs will intercept part of the budgets of election companies for themselves, later they will dictate terms to politicians ... put forward their own, "suppress" strangers ...
9. The Internet kills itself
The more sites, the higher the entropy - fumbling information - this is a headache for a 21st century person. I can say that any work aimed at reducing the entropy of the network has a chance of prosperity. Search engines of the modern type do not solve the problem. We need means of searching for information on fuzzy queries, we need robots-information cleaners, we need personal means of updating data. The Internet will be useful only when it is clean and everything is put in order ...
Davidov
December, 1998