The Net - News of its death is somewhat overstated....

Prediction is risky, especially about the future. However, the "death of" genre is always popular, clearly the benefit of great headlines today outweighs the potential egg on face later. Anyone remember Francis Fukuyama predicting the death of history, for example, just before it became clear that a new world structure was emerging (China, Islam etc) ?

Mark Cuban has now weighed in with his view that the Internet is dead...and boring at the same time:

On past evidence however, his timing may be as unfortunate as Mr Fukuyama's. Look at this curve

(courtesy Ray Kurzweil)

Push this to 2007 and you are probably on the flat end of an S curve just before the next one takes off.....

Actually, the headline is far more dramatic than the post - what he really said was:

The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today.

Few people's actual throughput to their homes have increased more than 5mbs in the past 5 years, and few people's throughput (if you dint understand the difference between throughput and the marketed downstream speeds your read from your ISP, you should) to their homes will increase more than 10mbs in the next 5 years. That's not enough to define a platform that allows really smart people to come up with groundbreaking ideas.

In fact, if you index the expected growth in bandwidth consumption by applications that are heavy LAST MILE bandwidth users (as opposed to the Internet backbone where there is plenty of bandwidth but consumers cant get to it) vs the actual increase in LAST MILE bandwidth available to the home, our net effective throughput to the home could decline over the next few years. The Internet is like a highway. There is plenty of room for everyone to go as fast as the throughput will let you go, that is until the traffic forces everyone to slow down.

For some reason a lot of people don't understand that concept.

So, let me repeat, The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead for the foreseeable future..

This to me describes the feeling of being on the top of an old S curve quite well.

So here is an alternative hypothesis - the 'Net is sitting at the point in the S curve in its current (broadband) cycle where closed ISP's like AOL (read closed SocNets like Facebook) et al replaced the Bulletin Boards (Blogs), just before Mosaic emerged.

So...its 1995, AOL (Facebook) Rules, the Chatterati are blithering on about a whole lot of stuff that was derivative, and about to be made fairly irrelevant - CD ROMs, Apple Online Shops etc etc.

The Internet, as it was, was getting dead boring.

But, if you had been trying to read the tealeaves at the time, you would have been watching the altnet, what people were doing with open comms techniques like FTP, the interesting work on network linkages that Tim Berners Lee had started...