The essential lesson I'd like to teach all the newcomers
to the Internet Gold Rush is simple:
The Internet is not ready for you.
It doesn't need you.
Go away please - come back when the infrastructure's ready.
Really, what is the Internet, anyways? It's just a group of interconnected
TCP/IP networks. My house qualifies as a full-fledged link in the Internet
food chain.
Nobody runs it. Nobody's in charge of it. When you consider things, it's
really quite remarkable that the Internet functions at all - it's just
a cooperative effort between a lot of folks who happen to run smaller networks.
Despite the surging popularity of browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer,
the Internet remains fundamentally hard to use - and the geeks who run many
of the parts like it that way, thank you very much.
The Internet is still a work in progress. Most of it's users are still geeks like me. And most people are still passive consumers rather than active producers. To produce, you need a brain, which many lack. Granted, the demographics of net.users like me may be desirable to many - but in three years I've used the Web to buy two things.
$ A copy of WinZip
$ A 'Dilbert' denim shirt (which my wife ruined with ink)
Does that make a revolution?
In time, there will be a lot of commerce done this way. The Internet will eventually become what Interactive TV promised to be for much of the last decade. My friend Rich, who had been working on Interactive TV with A Very Big Database Software Company, is now on an Internet project. The long-term economics make more sense. But right now, the people who want to get rich off the net should go away. Because you're just slowing down the people who are going to get the real work done. Come back in a few years, after we've finished building it, and nobody remembers what a modem was.
But feel free to leave your money behind when you leave.
-Josh Turiel
josht@janeshouse.com