The Internet is Stupid

[Forza1]

What a bunch of Monday morning quarterbacking!!

I think most of you have been unduly harsh with your criticism about this 1995 article. Back then I didn't have the slightest clue what the Internet was going to be like in 15 years and I doubt most of you could have guessed correctly a quarter of what actually has transpired since Clifford Stoll wrote his article. Bill Gates hardly touched on the Internet in his 1995 book, only doing so in the 1996 revised edition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead) so it is kind of silly to smack down a guy for his predictions when more computer savvy people weren't predicting much better than him.

In partial defense of Stoll, he was surveying the Internet landscape as of early 1995 and found it lacking many things which he felt would hinder the growth of it's use. I am sure most of his criticisms were valid to one degree or another. He was looking at a world with people using 14.4 and 28.8 modems to hunt for websites that weren't cataloged very effectively. And when a website was found, it might have taken MINUTES, not seconds like today, to have a page fully download, even though most were fairly barren with just text as even a couple of photos and/or graphics would slow things to a mindnumbing crawl even on small 640 x 480 screens (see how some websites looked back in 1996.. http://www.alextips.com/the-mighty-internet/popular-websites-in-1996-and-now/). It was a world that was blocked to the many people who were using AOL.. a world where there was hardly any video or music content to view.. where most of the websites were not professionally made nor owned by corporations.. a world that had less than 100,000 websites (many of which were .edu) compared to over 160 million in 2008 (according to royal.pingdom.com).

Stoll's REAL failure in his article was lack of vision, of not imagining that the Internet was just a baby in 1995, just having been born, and not seeing what it might become when it started to mature. He didn't foresee that phone modems would get faster, then people would switch to broadband. He didn't foresee screen sizes getting bigger so more content could be viewed.. that corporations spending millions on making content to view on websites.. that file sharing would take of.. and that more people would understand what the Internet was, how to harness it's power in almost infinite ways and that money could be made by using it.

Stoll was also unfortunate in that if he had just waited another year or so, perhaps he wouldn't have taken such a dim view on things. His article appeared just as the Internet started to explode! It appeared 5 months after Netscape was launched.. just 3 months after Amazon started.. a month after Yahoo started. When he wrote his article, there was no Google.. no Napster.. eBay started 7 months later.. no Craigslist.. no MapQuest.. no Blogger.. no Wikipedia.. no Myspace.. no Facebook.. no Rapidshare.. no Flickr.. no Hulu. According to royal.pingdom.com, 47 of 2009's top 50 most visited websites (according to Alexa rank) were not even created as of January 1st, 1995, and 15 of the those top 50 sites were started in either 1995 or 1996, easily the most of any 2 combined years from 1992 to 2009.

Of course the Internet of 2010 is vasty different than it was in 1995, just as it will be very different in 2025, and it is easy with 20/20 hindsight to see that Stoll was way off in his article. But do any of you feel you can make accurate, SPECIFIC predictions on how the Internet will be like in 2025 and what innovations, trends, and technology will be driving it's use? At least Stoll had guts enough to print his thoughts for prosperity to prove him right or wrong. I don't think he was a dope for what he wrote as there was no certainty of the Internet's long-term success on Feb. 27, 1995. At least Stoll had guts enough to print his thoughts for prosperity to prove him right or wrong. What he didn't take into account was the speed that technology enters our lives, how much people want to use that technology & integrate it into their lives, and all the various ways people will find to use that technology in ways almost unimaginable.

I think you're taking the H forum responses in a different direction... The problem with Stoll is that he was bashing the visionaries of the Internet. I think this commenter said it best:

"It is the equivalent of someone looking at a blank canvas and declaring that no one will ever draw anything on it. "


I don't see any reason we should defend Stoll. While I couldn't ever have predicted what the Internet in 2010 would be like; I was only 13 in 1995 and I knew for sure this was going to be the goddamn future.


-D

 

[pyrogx2000]

The guys right, its all a bunch of crap and everyone is way lazier now.