What do you think the future Internet will look like?
The responses I received varied a great deal, but usually began with something along the lines of “Wow. That’s a big question.”
And it is — one with an answer that is surely beyond the capacity of a single person’s imagination. But at some point in the past, when these six people were faced with the same question, they got at least part of it right. Barry Glick digitized location when he launched MapQuest. Jeremy Stoppelman bet on local tips and reviews with Yelp (Yelp). And Steve Case literally brought America online.
Steve Case, Co-Founder of AOL
I think that it will continue to evolve. In 25 years it has gone from a first phase, which was really a pick and shovel phase, to simply building the basic platform, the basic technology, the basic network, the basic tool to do well. The second 10 years really was about expansion and really taking it to the mainstream. And … the last few years, and I think the coming decade really, will be about — now that the internet really is ubiquitous, people are relying on it in increasingly habitual kind of ways — how do you not just create Internet businesses, but create businesses that can impact every aspect of people’s lives using the Internet as a tool.
…Someday it would be great if instead of being e-mail, it would just be called mail. Instead of being e-commerce it will just be called commerce, just because it is so ubiquitous that it is just taken for granted, much as we take for granted electricity or water or other kinds of utilities.
We’re not quite there yet. But we’re getting there. When you get there, it’s less of a focus on the Internet and a particular technology or industry because that’s faded into a part of your daily life. It’s more focused on what you can do with that and how it impacts important things: education, transportation, health care, communication — big things that affect people’s everyday lives. We just scratched the surface in terms of the Internet as a platform to disrupt those non-Internet businesses.
Ryan Ozimek, President of Open Source Matters
I think that the needs of the world, especially the world that we Joomla play in, have moved beyond the content management system or inventing the next cool feature for commenting on a blog.
I think what I’m excited about and where I see the future of the Internet going is more mobile, more focused on the cloud, and more about building really easy-to-use platforms that people can use to build the next generation of software that hasn’t even crossed our minds yet.
Jeremy Stoppleman, CEO of Yelp
If you really go far out there, ideally computing sort of fades away as something that you even notice. There’s talk of augmented reality and all that. But really what it gets to is that computing blends itself into our lives in such a way that it’s just always there. Whenever we have a question, the answer is just sort of presented to us and it’s done so in a way that is very unobtrusive. And some of the early things we’ve seen [with augmented reality], for instance with our Yelp Monocle Feature, you hold up a phone and see what businesses are ahead of you down the street.
But I think that’s a primitive version of “I’m thinking about what is down the street and somehow it is presented to me just automatically, without me necessarily even holding up a phone.” There’s just some way that it’s presented to me with technologies that I’m not even going to speculate [about] because it will just sound silly.
I think that the best technologies are the ones that we don’t really even have to think about. Over time, as the Internet matures, it will become something that is completely inter-woven [into] the fabric of our lives and not even something that we specifically tap into, but is just always presenting information to us.
Dries Buytaert, Drupal Founder
Initially people added a blog to their main website. I think the future is much more integrated, where social is part of everything you do, every website.
If you sum it up, it’s more websites within a single organization, more different devices that need to consume those websites with different experiences, and more social things. If I think about all of those things, it definitely feels like there’s going to be more complexity. More sites, more devices, more social, all of those things.
So it’s definitely going to be a more complex future, and that excites me in a way, because what I’m starting to see is that a lot of these organizations are starting to spend their dice on a single platform to manage all of that complexity around the web and to manage those experiences.
Barry Glick, Founder of MapQuest
In a way, I think the future of the internet will basically go away in the same sense that you couldn’t really ask the question, what is the future of electricity? I think certainly in the developing world and in parts of the world the Internet hasn’t reached, that’s certainly going to be part of the future, to get to be as ubiquitous as possible.
Right now the Internet has been very computer oriented. There’s been this association, like you need a computer to be connected, and I think that’s rapidly, of course, going away. You need a handheld device, and in the future you need a home entertainment system, TV, all connected to the Internet. So I think the Internet is going to be the invisible present power supply, and the boundary between some things that have boundaries today, like telephones, will go away. Television will go away. It will be the Internet, and there will be different display devices and different user interface or interaction devices, but that’s kind of how I see it.
Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Founder
If I were to wish for two things, they would be as much bandwidth as possible and ridiculously fast browser engines.
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