The coming decade may put a collective spin on technobabble, but this lexicon is here to stay. The only development that may eventually stanch its spread is the disappearance of computers as we know them: boxes connected to screen, keyboards, and peripherals. When and if that happens – when computers become nothing more than a component of the “integrated home entertainment center” – will much of the lingo now needed to talk about and explain them be necessary any longer?
One could argue that some aspects of technobabble hold the potential to form a universal language of technology – a sort of “High-Tech Esperanto” that might actually succeed.
Technobabble’s real victim could be the industry itself, which is in danger of sliding into the same semantic swamp in which wallow lawyers, civil servants, military officers, socialogists and politicians.
You remember, following the Jurassic Period, that plug boards gave way to key punches, teletypes to 3270s, and shared-logic word processors to PCs. Now it’s time that Wintel PCs give way to, or at least make room for, Internet stations, or whatever else you end up calling them.
By leveraging the superhighway, many types of companies will be able to re-engineer their business to provide dramatic improvements in internal processes and a quantum leap in customer services. In the financial sector, for example, the banks will be able to work far more intimately with their customers and, for that matter, with their customers’ customers.
Violations of privacy will certainly exacerbate next year’s Internet backlash, but me, I’m pretty much ignoring the privacy paranoids. Instead, I’m with the many who are enthusiastically striving to create cool Web pages, choosing fame over privacy for their companies and themselves.
Paid advertising will save the Internet in two ways: First, advertising will make the Internet sustainably inexpensive, like today’s newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio – a prospect that should excite universal-access advocates. Second, advertising will provide practical incentives for attracting the attention of Internet citizens to the information they need. The fact is, the Internet is now large and rapidly outgrowing its quaint netiquette. The Internet is running up against new limits – not on computing power, not on bandwidth, but on the attention span of its citizens.
The position of most network vendors will be that of a “global village cobbler,” forced into building many different kinds of networks technologies to service clients needs … Vendors have a tough road ahead … “Heterogeneity is here to stay.” And it won’t just be vendors that have to cope.
We’re seeing something in the Internet as significant as the birth of cities. It’s something that profound and with that sort of infinite possibilities. It’s really something new, it’s a new kind of civilization.
Networks extend the reach of their users, collapsing space and time, with an individual user sharing data and information with resources across the continents as easily as if they were next door. Tomorrow’s networks will be servants, serving the needs of their user.