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IS THE WEB DEAD?
In mid-May, Forrester Research Inc., a well-known, often-quoted technology research firm, released a report hailing the imminent and "inevitable" death of the World Wide Web.

"The problem with today’s Internet is that it’s dumb, boring and isolated," Forrester chairman and CEO George F. Colony lamented in an editorial accompanying the report. "News, sports and weather imparted on static Web pages offer essentially the same content presented on paper, which makes the online experience more like reading in a dusty library than participating in a new medium."

The future of the Internet, as Forrester sees it, lies in interactive "disposable" programs that are downloaded on demand and discarded after use, as well as in a whole fleet of Internet appliances and gadgets encompassing "nearly every device that runs on electricity."

While such bombastic assertions make for good headlines, one wonders if the death knell for the World Wide Web may be a little premature.

The dominance of disposable programs would seem to be predicated on the ubiquity of reliable high-speed Internet access for the majority of users. Recent news of fallout in the digital-subscriber-line and cable-access markets, though, seems to indicate that the broadband revolution we have heard so much about has not gotten off the ground quite yet.

And then there’s the infamous Internet appliance. From wireless "thin client" gadgets to refrigerators that order milk online when you’re running short, Internet appliances were to be the death of the Web browser–personal computer dominance of the Internet, according to technology pundits. To date, though, none of these appliances has made much of a splash in the marketplace, and it’s a safe bet that the PC remains the most widely used avenue for getting online.

That’s not to say that these new concepts aren’t exciting and that the Internet won’t continue to evolve, most likely in ways no one can predict. But in the meantime, is the "dumb, boring and isolated" World Wide Web really so bad?

It wasn’t that long ago that buying stocks required a trip to your broker; travel agents were necessary to book airline tickets; reading a newspaper from another city, much less another country, required taking out a subscription; and investigating a health problem, career change or vacation destination called for a trip to the library.

Now these tasks and many others can be performed quickly, easily and, in most cases, cheaply on the World Wide Web. Considering its size, short history and rapid development, the Web remains an amazingly accessible source of information and services that were out of reach for the average person just 10 or 15 years ago—not quite the "dusty library" to which Mr. Colony compares it.

Have we really grown so accustomed to this unprecedented access to information that it’s already become dumb and boring?

Reported by Joe Hoyle, electronic media editor, "hoylej{at}ada.org".

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