Let us think of nature for a moment. Think of rabbits whose reproduction rate is potentially very high. Once you have too many rabbits in the wild, not enough resources exist in nature in order to feeds them all. What’s more, predators that feed on rabbit will prosper and rapidly bring the number of rabbit down, thereby quickly reproducing themselves — the predators. It is a cycle in nature that has been explained by biologists many times in the past.

The same principles apply to the Web. When demand for Web sites is high (e.g. the birth in the early nineties), smashing success hits the few trailblazers and other envious business follow suit by joining. Yet, at some stage, the bubble must burst and there will be no more place for new sites to be accommodated. Is Internet reaching an anti-climax? I doubt so. According to one source, we are now observing a second dot-com boom develop. According to insightful predictions at Wired Magazine, we are yet to see the best of the Web:

2015

The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.

…

By 2015, desktop operating systems will be largely irrelevant. The Web will be the only OS worth coding for. It won’t matter what device you use, as long as it runs on the Web OS. You will reach the same distributed computer whether you log on via phone, PDA, laptop, or HDTV.

I have made merely identical predictions in the past:

• Blogs Recession
• Towards On-Line Operating Systems

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 30th, 2005 at 2:26 am and is filed under General, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.