Somewhere in the world in the next few weeks the billionth human being will sit down at a computer, log on to the internet for the first time and join the swelling throng in cyberspace. That is quite a record for a medium that broke away from its academic roots only a decade ago. But it may be only a taste of the upheaval in store over the next 10 years. Next week is the anniversary of the Netscape initial public offering - an event that triggered Wall Street’s dotcom mania. Netscape’s browser made the internet a more conducive place for the nontechnical user and spurred the creation of companies such as eBay, Yahoo and Amazon.com, which have all had 10th birthday parties of their own - although most dotcom companies never made it this far. It is worth considering the extent to
which those survivors have become part of the everyday lives of their users. The $34bn of goods that changed hands on eBay last year is roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Kenya; Yahoo’s 379m unique users are equal to the populations of the US and UK combined; and the average person on the planet views 10 webpages on Google each month.
Even early enthusiasts for the medium did not quite foresee how far it would work its way into popular culture. “It was a stretch to say that niche focus newsgroups and bulletin boards about Unix would some day be newsgroups about the latest Harry Potter book or Batman movie,” says Mary Meeker, the Morgan Stanley internet analyst who was among the first on Wall Street to tout the
internet’s potential.
Much of the early euphoria was of course misplaced, even if it has been proved right over the longer term.
Courtesy: The Financial Times, August 8, 2005