Week 11 EOC: Final

The future of the Internet is like anything else in the world. Nothing is ever guaranteed.  Big shots like Facebook who were once thought to be Internet juggernauts are now losing money in the stock market almost hourly. Its almost as if the dot com boom and crash happened all at once to the same company. Future Shock was a book written by Alvin Toffler. While the book is more than 30 years old, it still brings up valid points. The title of the book refers to when people are no longer able to keep up with the pace of change. Former powerhouses like AOL are barely ever mentioned anymore as Internet service providers. Nothing is ever certain about the internet. Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, talk about how he thinks the internet will take over physical items such as mail. “Somedayit 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 isso ubiquitous that it is just taken for granted, much as we take for granted electricityor water or other kinds of utilities.” I think this quote holds more truth than anything else about the Internet. Over at lest the next ten years, I see the future of the Internet somewhat staying as it is. The changes are not going to be about the Internet, but how you use the Internet. With cell phones, computers and tablets, there are so many ways to browse the Internet. All people seem to really want these days are more bandwidth, faster download speeds and faster browsers. “That's an enormous gap between what'scurrently possible and what's commercially available. But as time passes, thecosts of producing ultra-high-speed networks will decrease. Eventually, theaverage consumer will be able to download a high-definition movie in a secondor play cloud-based video games without a hint of lag.” The Internet has evolved a ton during the last decade. And again, I don’t think the Internet will change drastically over the next 10 years like it has, but how the user experiences the Internet.