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reborn as 'X Internet'
Sage: Yo, look for yet higher levels of interactivity
By Jeremy Schlosberg
"The web’s days are numbered."
So begins a recent report from Forrester Research, which seeks to shake the internet world up a bit by predicting the imminent demise of the web as we know it.
What is destined to arise in its place, says Forrester, is something called the "X Internet."
The X Internet is a nickname for what Forrester researchers identify as two new "waves of innovation" that they say will soon supplant today’s internet experience.
One of these waves is the so-called "extended internet," in which internet connectivity is pushed into many different devices beyond the PC.
The other is what Forrester calls the "executable internet," which refers to a new level of interactivity online involving web sites that function more like software and less like pages to read.
"The question is how much do you want to view the internet through the confining window of the browser?" says principal analyst Carl Howe, the report’s lead author.
Experiencing the internet through a browser frame, he says, restricts what users can do.
That’s why people are already tired of the "unsatisfying sites" and "flat experiences" they encounter online, according to the report.
Of the two branches of the "X Internet," the "extended" branch has gotten more attention to date. Pundits and entrepreneurs have been talking for years about things like net-enabled washing machines that will contact the repair service when something breaks or is about to break.
How much consumers desire this sort of advance is a question so far unanswered. Howe himself doesn’t figure the extended internet will affect consumers all that directly.
Instead, he says, it’s bound to be more of a B2B phenomenon, introducing new levels of efficiencies to business operations.
As for the executable internet, the concept is fuzzier. In the report, Forrester identifies the executable internet’s projected "killer app" as the rather vague "responsive experiences" (see chart).
To help make the idea more concrete, Howe points to Smartmoney.com’s Java-enabled "Map of the Market" as providing a glimpse of what the executable internet might feel like when it gets here.
The feature offers functions beyond what’s typically found on the web, he says--such as the way the map changes in real time as the market changes, without the standard "click-refresh" cycle.
In the report, Howe affirms Forrester’s prediction that the executable internet will become the principal means by which people interact with the net by 2005.
This is the theory.
Not everyone, however, is convinced that Forrester has done much but coin a buzzword.
Some dismiss the entire idea out of hand.
"The ‘X Internet’ is unadulterated nonsense, the pinnacle of the foolish consultant name game, where you come up with a cute label for something that’s already happening and then try to take credit for it," says Clay Shirky, a partner for technology and product strategy at the Accelerator Group, an internet business incubator.
First, he says, to trumpet some new "extendable" internet implies that the "old" internet was somehow all about locked-in features and functions—which he insists is wrong.
"The internet has always been and will always be extended, from the day that the first email program was created as an afterthought right up to today, where some kid in Palo Alto or Bangalore or Taipei is right now working on something that will change the world."
Second, Shirky says, the internet is already "executable," particularly since the introduction of Java in 1996.
Because programmers will always continue to add to what the internet can do, he says, it’s pointless to declare the end of one internet and the beginning of another.
"No cutesy name will be needed because the new capabilities will exist alongside the existing ones."
Forrester’s Howe, for his part, acknowledges that the X Internet idea is meant more to draw attention to the importance of the trends being discussed than to pretend a revolution is at hand.
"Neither of these ideas is new," he says. "Both are basically distillations of things already happening in the market."
But even as such, critics take issue with an "executable" internet as something so new and different that users will return in droves to a web they’ve otherwise "tired" of, as the report says.
"If the argument for the X Internet is that these developments will lead to a qualitative sea change in how individuals and businesses deal with the internet, it is science fiction," says Donald Bellomy, director of Internet Business Strategies for Strategy Analytics, a high-tech market consulting firm based in Wellesley, Mass.
"We haven’t yet reached a point where individuals and businesses can take effective advantage of what the web can do now," he adds.
Forrester, for its part, believes that the executable internet will succeed precisely because it will add new functions, giving people the chance to do things they’ve never been able to do before—a worthwhile idea because, as Howe sees it, what the web offers to date isn’t very impressive when all is said and done.
"Let's face it--most experiences that companies give users today are bad experiences," he says. "So much of the executable internet is about improving the existing internet experience over the web."
He suggests that this will have a lot to do with introducing real-time applications to an environment that has to date been relatively static.
At the same time, he notes that users themselves may see these new functions more as enhancements than things that are new and unheard of. "My guess is people will just say, ‘It’s a better way of working on the net,’" he says.
Which is precisely Shirky’s point, oddly enough, when he fulminates over jargon-filled research reports.
"For years, pundits have been desperate to get credit for predicting the future paradigm-busting revolution," he says. "But the sad truth of the matter is that it is the engineers, not the consultants, who make the changes, and those changes, even the radical ones like the web, don’t replace the internet, they extend it.
"My bold prediction for the name for the internet five years from now is ‘the internet.’"
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THE WEB VS. THE ‘X INTERNET’ |
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| The Web |
Executable Internet |
Extended Internet |
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Number of devices |
Millions |
Hundreds of millions |
Billions |
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Focus |
Browsers |
User-focused software |
Devices |
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Killer app |
Web, IM, e-commerce |
Responsive experiences |
Real-time business apps |
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Data |
HTML, XML |
Executables and XML |
Environmental data |
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Model |
Server-centric |
Peer-to-peer |
Device-centric |
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Connections |
User-driven |
Opportunistic |
Opportunistic |
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Time frame |
1993 to 2001 |
2001 onward |
2005 onward |
| Source:
Forrester Research
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May 29, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media.
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