The Future of the Web

In this section of "Untangling the Web," we're going to take a look at the future of the Web.

And looking at the future is always a difficult kind of thing to do. You might have gone to talks about the future of mainframes or time-sharing or Gopher or Mosaic or other things like that, and you know what's happened to them. And the same fate could befall the Web. But until it does, it will be useful to talk about it. Don't forget that the future always arrives a little bit before we're ready to give up the present, and that could certainly happen here with the Web.

Let's take a quick look at the state of the Internet today. There's about 90,000,000 Net users today, and that number's probably wrong, because the number keeps changing, so there's no way to give you an accurate number. But you should get the sense that there's lots and lots of users on the Net today; and the user count is doubling about every year. If this continues -- and there's every reason to believe it will -- there's going to be over a billion users by the year 2000. That's a lot of Web users. There's about 90,000,000 URLs, and again, we can't be sure about that number; but that's about what Alta Vista, who goes out and looks at all of them, says -- about 90,000,000 URLs on the Web, and about 150 an hour being added. So if you're out there looking at sites right now, you're falling behind, even as you look at Websites. If the rate of growth remains unchanged, it's going to take about three years to look at all the URLs, if you looked at them at the rate of one a second. And of course, you know how slow the Web is. There's no way in the world to look at them at one a second.

One of the interesting things to look at is to look at the new Internet Explorer by Microsoft. This has a code word, NASHVILLE, and it's due to be introduced in the summer of 97, but who knows when it's really going to be there?

Internet Explorer 4.0 has some interesting features. The most interesting feature really is that Internet Explorer 4.0 is going to be tightly integrated into the operating system, whether that's Windows 95 or Windows 97 or whatever Microsoft chooses to call it. The point is that today, right now, you have a choice of lots of free browsers. In fact, Windows 95 for a while has come with a free browser, Internet Explorer 3.0. You could have used it, or you could have used -- if you're at a University -- you could have used the free Netscape browser. But with Internet Explorer 4.0, the browser is going to be integrated into the operating system. You will use the same browser to look at your local file systems as you will to look at the Web. That means whether you want to or not, you're going to be using Internet Explorer 4.0 if you're using a Windows operating system. It also means that folders become HTML pages, so your folders, your desktop, everything that you see on the screen, becomes a Web object if you'd like it to be. So Internet Explorer 4.0 is going to be very tightly integrated into the operating system, and I think it's going to change everything.

Here's a quick peek at what an Internet Explorer 4.0 screen is likely to look like, but this is obviously going to change between now and the time this product is actually released.

Another interesting thing is Windows CE. This is a new operating system where CE stands for Consumer Electronics. This was announced in mid-September by Microsoft. What Windows CE is, it's an operating system for little, tiny electronic devices, and in fact, there's a bunch of these little, tiny devices right now. Windows CE looks just like Windows 95. It has little programs, pocket versions, of all the standard Microsoft programs; so it has a pocket version of Word and a pocket version of Excel and various other Microsoft products. There's a bunch of these things around. Casio makes one called the Casiopeia, a little hand-held thing that almost fits a jacket pocket. Again, it looks just like Windows 95.

Another thing that's coming is a whole bunch of network computers. One of those is the IBM Network Station. It is a tiny device. It's about eight inches by ten inches by one and a quarter inches. It has no disk storage, like most network computers. In this case, it uses an IBM Power PC chip and it can have up to 64 megabytes of RAM on the thing, and of course, it has a keyboard and mouse. But remember, no disk storage! Not even a floppy disk on the thing!

The way this thing works -- and this is typical of network computers -- is it connects to a network via a network board, so this little box, this tiny box, has a network board which supports EtherNet and token ring and other network protocols. It has serial and parallel ports, so you could hook up a color monitor or a local printer to it if you care to do that. When you turn it on, what it does, it goes off to the network. It can't boot from its disks because it has no disks. It goes off to the network, downloads stuff from the server, authenticates you, and then starts running stuff -- all from the server.

The IBM network station is the first of a family of network computers planned by IBM. There's going to be lots of these things, if this product is successful. A Web browser is going to be built for the thing by a company called NAVIO. NAVIO is a subsidiary of Netscape.

There's all kinds of other network computers coming. There's Sun's JavaStation, which was recently announced. Apple has a little thing called Pippin. Actually, because things change so quickly, Apple just recently announced Pippin, and there are rumors now that Apple is going to drop the Pippin, but it's likely to be continued to be made by the company called Bandai which is really the company manufacturing the thing. Oracle has a net computer, and Microsoft is talking about something called a NetPC. The NetPC is going to be kind of interesting because it is going to have disks on it, and, not surprisingly, it's going to run Windows software.

There are some downsides of network computers. In fact, I think there's very serious downsides of network computers, and you should seriously consider whether this kind of solution makes sense for you. For some folks, it will, but for an awful lot of folks, it won't. The network computers tend to have very specialized, restrictive operating systems; and the operating system determines what you're going to be able to run on this network computer. So these network computers aren't going to run all your software. For example, on most of them (except for the thing that's still a dream by Microsoft) they're not going to run things like Microsoft Office 97, something you may want to run. Because there's no hard disks and often no diskettes, you really have to use the network for everything. newpar Now, one company after another facing user opposition is talking about adding some kind of disks to these network computers. I think you're likely to see all of them have some kind of disk capability, one way or another, though many of them today are made without it. While each of these things, each of the network computers, supports some kind of network browser -- because that's what these things are supposed to be, these things are supposed to be little, tiny Web computers that are much cheaper than regular computers -- they don't support all the plug-ins. If you recall, plug-ins are hardware and operating system specific, so what you have to do is you have to rewrite plug-ins for every one of these little network computers. Now, there are thousands -- tens of thousands -- of plug-ins, and it's unlikely that all of them are going to be rewritten for every network computer. So if you're using a network computer and you use a browser, some of the things that you thought were part of the browser, which are really plug-ins, you're going to discover, won't work. And don't forget, when the network is down, you will do no computing. No computing at all, because these network computers are totally dependent upon the network.

There's a new company called NAVIO. NAVIO is an affiliate of Netscape and its mission is to develop Internet software for things that don't look like computers; like VCRs and like telephones and TVs and things. Lots of people say that NAVIO is really developing software for toasters. That might not even be too far-fetched, to imagine a toaster that can chit-chat with other things. All this, of course, because it's a subsidiary of Netscape, is going to be based on Netscape technology, so we can expect, for example, a Netscape Navigator browser in the thing.

NAVIO is going to allow all kinds of devices access to the Internet. Again, we have to think about whether we want our toaster to have access to the Internet and whether this makes any sense or not; though it does make some sense to have our TVs and VCRs and other things like that have access to the Internet -- perhaps. NAVIO is going to support Java, JavaScript, HTTP and all the other things that Netscape supports. Their hope is it's going to be extensible via plug-ins, but remember, when I talked about plug-ins, that plug-ins are operating system specific. It means that they have to be rewritten for NAVIO, just like they're going to have to be rewritten for Windows CE and every other operating system.

A new, interesting consumer product that uses the Web is WebTV. You can see this on electronic store shelves right now. It's a little set top box for your TV that gives you Web access and Email. What it does is it has two jacks on the back of it; one plugs into your TV or your VCR and the other plugs into your phone line. Now, don't forget -- it plugs into your phone line. This means that you're going to get modem speed access to the Web, which sometimes is not the fastest thing in the world. However, because they're going to display Web images on TV, they've done some interesting things to enhance the image. I've looked at this, and actually, it looks surprisingly good on a TV. Even text looks pretty good, which is kind of amazing. And your remote control also has Web browsing tools, but there's also a keyboard that you can get optionally so you can do serious Web browsing and watch TV at the same time.

Right now, Sony and Magnavox both sell these things, and it's a relative inexpensive thing. It's just a few hundred dollars, and you can have one on your TV.

Now, we talked a little bit before about the possibility of talking to things like toasters and TVs. Now some of this might be silly, or might sound silly to you, but there's all kinds of things that are happening along these lines. Netscape, for example, has announced a browser that's going to use IBM's voice recognition software, so you'll be able to talk to your browser instead of just poking around on the keyboard. And IBM's Aptiva computers now come with Home Director. Home Director is some software that allows you to communicate over house wiring to little S12 controllers using something called an X-10 standard. And what this lets you do, it lets you send information to appliances all over your house. Now there's a new CE Bus standard where, if you put the proper chip into every appliance, what you'll be able to do is have two-way communications between your computers and anything plugged into your house wiring. This means that you'll be able to turn VCRs on and off, you'll be able to chit-chat with TVs, toasters, and whatever. Now, it's sometimes hard to imagine what uses we're going to put some of these things to, but there's going to be interesting uses coming down the pike very soon.

Cybercash is another interesting thing that's happening more and more on the network. Instead of using money, real money, on the Web -- it's very difficult to move real money around, and a lot of folks are very concerned about moving credit cards and things around on the Web -- all kinds of companies are going out and building digital cash, secure digital cash, where you can have digital cash and you can go off and buy things on the Web with this.

There's a bunch of converging technologies that are going to change the Web. One thing is wireless communications. Everybody today is using cellular phones and PCS (Personal Communications System) phones more and more. We can expect that all devices, cars, trucks, watches, radios, anything you own or use, is going to be connected wirelessly. This means that when you wander around, you'll have access to the Web. Today, you only have access to the Web if you can get to some place where you can plug into the network. Another converging technology is GPS, the Global Positioning System. This is a system of a bunch of satellites. Little inexpensive receivers today can go out, look at the satellites, and locate precisely where they are on the face of the earth. Today boats use them, aircraft use them, and people hiking in the woods more and more use them. But the implication of this technology is that every device, which of course are going to all be wireless, every device is going to know where it is. And that means that every other device is going to know where every other device is. So we'll have wireless devices and we'll be aware of where they are, where they're going. And this is going to change things rather dramatically.

Some other converging technologies are Direct Broadcast Satellites. Direct Broadcast Satellites are going to enable all these mobile devices that we have out here to be able to communicate at very high bandwidth. Another technology is the CE Bus that I talked about before. This is the Consumer Electronic Bus. We can expect that CE Bus chips will be built into all devices so all devices that you buy from a store with anything special, when you plug them into your house wiring, will be able to communicate if you decide to do that. Also, voice recognition software is getting much, much better. IBM has a system, for example, now that you can dictate right into. If we can imagine a time -- and it's easy to do -- when you'll be able to talk to any device and have it recognize things, this is going to change the way we deal with computers and other devices that look like computers. Also, Carnegie-Mellon University is working with vision systems. These are systems that today enable a car to stay between lanes on a road, and this is a road that's not special at all. The vision system actually looks at the same white lines and the same edge of the road that you would look at and manages to keep a van in the road. Lastly, 3-D and virtual reality systems are becoming more and more common, so we'll be able to wander around the world in some virtual reality state and see the way things are happening.

There's some evolutionary signs right now that give us hints and clues as to what's happening in the future, and that the future is closer than you might think. One thing that's happening is CGI scripts are disappearing rapidly, and being replaced with direct Application Program Interface links to SQL databases and other databases. This means that the Web is going to be speeded up quite a Bit. VRML -- this is Virtual Reality Modeling Language -- Bubble Viewers, and other things like this enable us to wander around places that have not been built, places that are only in our imagination, or places that we otherwise couldn't go. With VRML, we also could do things like video conferencing, traveling, and other interesting things that today are difficult to impossible to do. We can expect that encrypted, secure, searchable, multi-media Email and newsgroups are going to soon be available and, in fact, in version 4 of Netscape, all these things have been announced. We can also expect better Web robots, customized news, and all kinds of Web profiles to be available very soon.

Taking a look at Java today, which is one of the important features on the Web, what we can see is that Java today is becoming a serious tool. For a while, it was just a toy. If you looked at it on the Web and looked at most of the Java applets, that's really what they were. They were just cute toys. But more and more, this is becoming a serious tool. Dun and Bradstreet is marketing a Java purchasing system, for example. That's quite a serious use of Java. Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Sun -- nearly everybody is making Java part of their operating system, so we can expect that Java's going to become a standard part of all operating systems. Sun has even started a new division, called JavaSoft, which just worries about Java. And companies like Borland and Symantec, etc., all have Java tools that make Java development easier, if not easy.

Despite all these signs that Java is doing wonderful things, there are a couple things that one might be concerned about. For example, in addition to all these wonderful companies offering wonderful Java applications, there are companies like Sausage Software, coding applets they call snaglets, and Starfish software, and a host of little companies doing kind of questionable things with Java, certainly not serious stuff. Also, it might be that some of the Java activity just might amount to people hedging their bets. I mean, who wants to be left out of this Java phenomena? Everything is Java today, and so everybody's offering something with Java. And also, Sun is even hedging its bets, offering a product called Tcl/Tk, a little plug-in that does a lot of the things that Java does, though not really all of them.

In the future, Java will have just-in-time compilers. In fact, just-in-time compilers are available today; they're just not really widespread and they're not available on all platforms and all operating systems. But more and more, Java -- which is an interpreted system and as a result runs rather slow -- is going to have these just-in-time compilers which will speed up processing, making Java a more serious language for doing serious applications. As I said before, Java is going to become part of operating systems. There's also going to be better visual development environments coming for Java. Today, it's very difficult to develop in Java, and that's just because Java is very young. But as Java matures, we're going to see better ways to develop in Java. There's also going to be a whole bunch of Java-based Management Information System products. That means your MIS group is going to be able to use Java to do MIS applications.

Other things that are in the wings are things like Cyberdog, Active X, OCX, OLE. There's a whole bunch of tools out there being developed by all kinds of folks to enhance what the browser and what the Web can do.

Will the World Wide Web last? When we opened this section, we said everything else we'd ever talked about --mainframes, Gopher, everything else -- seemed to have disappeared. Well, things don't last too long, and especially technologically, things don't last too long. History says it's unlikely that anything's going to last very long, especially in the technical area. What I think we can expect is that much of the Web is going to become invisible. It's going to be buried in other systems. Maybe it will be totally buried inside a chip. You probably know that inside your car you have a bunch of computers, but you don't see them. You don't think about the fact that you operate some operating system on one of the computers inside your car, because it's totally buried inside. Whatever happens to the Web, we can expect that international and local on-line information, application, entertainment systems are going to be around for a long time, either as the evolutionary product of the Web or as some totally new system.

On the new Web, many things are not going to be free. You've probably noticed that already, that some of the things are not free. The Web today is really dominated by commercial institutions. There are more URLs that are associated with commercial institutions than there are universities. That's not the way things started out. In the beginning, the Web -- and in fact, the entire Internet -- was dominated by the universities and the government. Today, it's a big site for commercial institutions. Not that universities and government don't play a strong role. Universities are going to probably buy lots of things, lots of services and facilities and software from the Web, whereas in the past, universities actually provided most of the things for the Web. So universities are changing their role from a provider to a buyer of services on the Web. And lastly, Web publishing is going to be done by everybody, and it's going to be done by everybody without these people knowing HTML or doing any programming.

On the new Web, services and content are going to become more important than technology, and more important than just putting up some funny Web pages. The Web today delivers services, and that is going to be key. On the new Web, you're going to see more and more new services. Now, there are some big content players around already, and if I rattle off the list of content players (like AT&T and Disney and Sony and Nintendo and that bunch of folks) you notice there's no universities in this list. Well, universities supply some content for the Web, but the big content players today are all commercial companies. Today's HTML, which is supposed to support this new Web, is totally inadequate. We really need much-enhanced HTML and more CD-ROM quality plug-ins are needed. Fortunately, all these things are coming.

Some Web challenges that we have to face are that the Web is too slow. If you use the Web at home, you certainly appreciate this, but even if you used the Web in your office, the Web still is very slow. Now, there's something new coming called HTTP 1.1. This is just a new version of the Hyper Text Transport Protocol, and this is supposed to speed up things a bit, but that's really all it does. It speeds up things by a few percent. What we need is, we need dramatic speedups here, and that's going to take, I think, some really new technology. Also today, there's really inadequate searching. Now, we talked earlier about how you can search the Web, and perhaps that sounded very good to you. But we need much better search engines, more metadata. By metadata, I mean things that you don't see on the document, like author, title, and things that we can search. We also need more peer review. Today, if you go out on the Web and you look at some document about brain surgery, it might have been written by a brain surgeon. Or it might have been written by an 11-year-old. And you really can't tell the different, and that makes the Web a little difficult to use.

Here's a couple visions of what the Web is going to look like. Now, I really can't speak for Netscape, but that's not going to stop me from trying anyway. Here's what I think Netscape is thinking. Netscape, I think, is thinking that the browser does everything and makes operating systems irrelevant. This would be especially good for Netscape. You need an application? Great! Download a Java applet and run it under the Netscape or the NAVIO browser. Remember, the NAVIO browser is going to be on every little device including your toaster. The browsers are going to be on everything! If the thing has a chip, it will have a browser on it. (We can guess whose browser it will have on it. It'll have a Netscape browser on it!) Answering machines will have them, Xerox machines will have them. We won't need or care about operating systems or platforms. Everything is going to be "browsercentric."

Here's what I imagine Microsoft is thinking. They think browsers are going to become irrelevant, although they make one. The browser war, I think, Microsoft thinks is over because no one's going to depend upon a browser. What's going to happen is Internet functionality -- in fact, all the functionality of the browser -- is going to be buried inside the operating system. In fact, we're beginning to see that already, and we're going to see that the Windows operating system offers the best Web functionality and runs the best OS. (Now this is what Microsoft is thinking.) And all the applications, of course, the best ones are by Microsoft.

Another possible vision is that maybe both these visions are right, that browsers and operating systems both become totally hidden, as they are in cars and other places where computers are totally hidden. What users see are applications, and these application, of course, can access the networks and the Web. We also might imagine a case where we're going to have special purpose intelligent devices that communicate -- TVs, cars, phones, and all kinds of things like that. What the users will stop seeing is operating systems, hardware, and browsers, and what they'll start seeing is the Web services being offered in a way that makes all these things invisible.

What should you do about the Web? Well, enjoy it! This thing that just a short time ago was a toy is becoming a seriously useful tool, and you should use it. And you can use it for all kinds of things. Remember that everyone needs to be able to browse and publish using on-line information systems, but don't be distracted by every new Web technology which you're going to see almost every day. The Web is not a substitute for thinking and doing research. Like other tools, it can be used to create monstrosities or Mona Lisas. We hope that you use it to create Mona Lisas.

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