The Future
The future of companies like Netscape looks bright. The projected numbers as to how many people will be on the
Internet in just four short years are pretty impressive (See fig. 4-1). Many experts are projecting the Internet to reach
300 million users by the year 2000! As long as more and more people just keep signing on, the businesses making
money from the Net are very happy. The trick in this industry is to keep a step ahead of the game. As I pointed out in
the last chapter, this is the primary reason for the success of the Netscape Corporation.
Projected Internet Growth
(Data Shown in Millions of Users)
Figure 4-1
In other parts of the industry such as the service provider market, competition is a little more fierce and looks to
continue that way in the future. Local ISPs are a threat to companies like AOL and CompuServe and now some of the
large cable and telephone services are trying to jump on the bandwagon and offer connections to the Internet. MCI
and AT&T are both in the development or test stages of offering Internet service to their customers, and TCI is
working on a similar deal hooking up fiber optics in many areas and offering what is called a "cable modem" to connect
to the Internet. All of this competition will hopefully drive down prices and stimulate the market in this area.
Another recent development that will probably see wide spread use in the future is that of the Internet Telephone. This
service (which will be packaged with Netscape Navigator 3.0 as well as with other products) allows you to talk long
distance in real time over the Net for free. This is certain to put the telephone companies in a tizzy and will most likely
see heavy consideration in the not-so-distant future.
Nonetheless, the biggest problem facing the Internet is that of speed and bandwidth. The twisted pair or POT lines are
simply not capable of transmitting full motion, full screen video. With fiber optics as well as the increased use of ISDN
lines some of these problems are remedied. Also new products such as cable modems and other digital based software
are promissing increased speed in the very near future. However, many computers are not capable of handling this
much data. The MPEG and MPEG-2 chips have made full screen, full motion (30 fps) video possible on desktop
computers and are becoming standard in most models. What does all of this mean? It means that we are moving closer
and closer to what the "dream" of the Internet community is. That is being able to have video phones, to download an
entire song at 44.1 kHz (CD Quality) in a couple of seconds, or being able to download high resolution, full screen, full
motion video almost instantly. I have no doubt that these things will happen, although it remains to be seen just how
quickly these things will come about.
Financially speaking, the Internet has a lot of potential. I have already discussed the phenomenal successes of the
Netscape Corporation, but that is by no means an isolated case. Companies in all sorts of related fields are booming
because of the Internet. From the computer and modem companies that build the hardware, to the software companies
that design the browsers, server software, and HTML authoring tools, to the ISPs, everyone is making money. And
most recently, Microsoft has jumped on the Internet bandwagon, taloring all of its new software to Internet integration. They have also offered the first serious threat to Netscape's reign in the browser arena with "Internet Explorer". Microsoft has seen the financial potential of the Internet and has actually shifted the gear of the whole company to focus on the Internet.
The nature of the computer industry, the Internet included, is that technology changes at such a fast rate that there is
always new ways to make money. If the point where everyone is reached much the way television is today, the Internet
business will be a multi-billion dollar a year business just like television is today. All sings point that direction, but as I
have mentioned before, the future is so hard to predict in this industry. You never know what may be developed a year
from now.
The future may hold a lot of unknowns, but one thing is for certain: the Internet is here to stay. It will no doubt go
through technological changes and may someday only slightly resemble the Internet of today, but people want this
global communication. People are always trying to find ways to bring this world closer and closer together and the
technology that has achieved this goal to the greatest degree thus far is the Internet.
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