Microtransactions need extremely low overheads (you can’t spend 32 cents collecting a 5-cent charge) and they are thus well suited for computers as long as a simple billing service is available. No credible billing service exists on the Internet today for microtransactions, but I predict the emergence of one within a very short amount of time.
Even if msn wanted to kill the Internet, it couldn’t.
By the end of the millennium, we will see the start of the “Webconnected” society.
Web browsers accessing multiple Web servers is the architecture for the next wave of client/server computing. Carry this approach a little further and we will see the resurrection of big applications running on big servers that are accessed by “skinny” clients running Web browsers – the modern equivalent of massive time-sharing machines connected to thousands of terminals.
[The Internet] will crash and be the big joke of our day. It’s actually two users logging on 10 million times each. [Bill Gates] will lose more money in one day than anyone else in the history of the world.
Convergence is a model … interconnection is probably the right model. If you connect one to the other, I think you’re pretty much there.
All of this stuff is being driven out of the computer industry, as opposed to the cable industry or any other industry. The television industry, or whatever. So, I think what the computer industry is doing is sort of where it’s going to be leading.
Congestion is only ever a problem if bandwidth is standing still. I don’t think it’s too much of an overstatement to say that bandwidth is going to be increasing, overall, in scope – and decreasing in price – even faster than microprocessors are in terms of power over the next 10 years … In the very short term, the only bottleneck is really into the hub.
You’re going to find that people are going to start viewing the world as…as a concentric circle. In the very core of the circle is yourself, and then you move out from there into the workgroup, across the enterprise, and then to all of your existing customers, to all of your partners and then to all of the broader world, in general, to all of your potential partners and potential customers. It all comes down to a matter of access control: a matter of private domains of activity and public domains of activity and the ability for you to seamlessly jump between all of the different domains that you have access to.
We’re actually getting fairly close to [having a comprehensive all-in-one front end to the Internet] already, and I think, over time, it’s going to get a lot more coherent. I think the applications of something like Netscape to internal networks and to corporate-wide LANs are at least as interesting as applied to the Internet as a whole.