Ctrl-Alt-Frank
Internet is here to stay
Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) - by Frank Catalano
Welcome to the death of the Internet.
What? You haven't HEARD? It's been in all the papers. That is, the papers that still cover technology: The Toronto Star recently killed the high-tech section it had published since 1994, and The Seattle Times and Seattle Weekly dramatically scaled back their tech pages early this year.
Throughout broadcast and print media, tech reporters are being let go or tech coverage reassigned to consumer and business beats.
But the Web is dead. It must be, because Forrester Research issued a report trumpeting, "The Death of The Web is Inevitable." The report claimed the Web will be replaced by something called the "executable Internet," which, as Forrester describes it, simply sounds like the Web without a toolbar.
But then again, this is one of the analyst firms that previously projected lots of billion dollar Web industries - the very same industries now worth $0 billion. Forrester at least was kind enough to support its Web deathwatch by subsequently laying off 15 percent of its own Internet-hyping staff.
The Internet is dead, all right, but only for those who wanted to get rich by basically doing nothing (e.g., day-trading or accumulating inflated stock options) or who don't remember the cyclical nature of personal computer developments.
We've seen this before, even if your own personal browser cache isn't old enough to have stored it.
Click back to the mid-1970s, when personal computers were new and odd. Dozens of companies sprang up to build them for hobbyists and normal people, companies with names like Altair, Commodore, Eagle, Kaypro, and Osborne.
Chaos reigned, since manufacturers used either different operating systems (e.g., CP/M, AppleDOS, MS-DOS) or variations on an operating system (e.g., DR-DOS, PC-DOS). As a result, a program which ran fine on one PC may not have run at all on another.
Scroll forward to the mid-1980s, when the PC operating system competition had largely settled down and there was a big enough market for off-the-shelf, packaged computer software. Scores of companies sprang up to develop it, companies with names like MySoftware, Aldus, Software Publishing Corp., Berkeley and Fox.
The plethora of packages created the retail software store and the fortunes of Egghead Discount Software and Softwarehouse (now CompUSA). Over time, too many choices and too much duplication led to consolidation and many software companies died out.
Jump ahead to the early 1990s, when the PC got far more capable with the widespread introduction of CD-ROM drives and sound cards. Hundreds of companies sprang up to develop multimedia programs on CD-ROM for home, school and business, companies with names like Splash Studios, Medio, SoftKey and Books That Work.
The glut of multimedia CD-ROM software (presaged by SoftKey founder Kevin O'Leary's claim of "software is cat food," a claim that resulted in CD-ROMs priced and treated as a commodity complete with loss-leader pricing) led to a dramatic die-back of multimedia CD-ROM developers and the acquisition of many who remained.
Now select the late 1990s, when average PCs were commonly connected to the World Wide Web, a medium for information and a channel for commerce. Thousands of companies saw the opportunity and ... well, you get the idea.
What makes this boom-bust cycle different than those that came before, I suspect, is the Internet promise of greed instantly satisfied. More companies offered more stock and stock options to employees and the public than in any previous cycle, and it became a frenzy that fed upon itself.
The interest wasn't in the Internet or technology - it was in easy money. When this get-rich-quick scheme collapsed spectacularly on the Nasdaq on April 14, 2000, so did most of the public's "interest" in technology. What was left were those who had to execute clever ideas with hard work.
Yet just as PCs, packaged software, and multimedia CD-ROM didn't go away after the cycle of introduction, glut and adoption ended, neither will the Internet. Even if its every development no longer is in the spotlight of mass media coverage and analyst reports, the Internet has been added to the list of basics people expect of PCs.
It has visibly integrated itself into our lives - from the URLs on the corks in bottles of Chateau Ste. Michelle wines, to the e-mail addresses in personal ads.
Welcome to the end of the last cycle. Or the beginning of the next one. They're pretty much the same thing.
Frank Catalano is still the principal of a strategic marketing firm advising technology companies, provides tech industry commentary for KCPQ-TV Seattle, and is co-author of "Internet Marketing for Dummies." He can be reached at catalano@catalanoconsulting.com.
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