It is my observation that one of the hardest things to do as a businessperson is to look into the future and be able accurately see a picture of how things are going to be.  As I sit here today, I had no idea I would be paying over $4 a gallon for gas for example.  We are great at adjusting to a reality once it is here, but not so good at being able to postulate how things might be different in a few years.  Making this kind of vision work in the world of technology is even harder since the rate of invention is staggering at the moment.  All of this leads me to wanting to spend a few posts taking a shot at predictions about how we are going to use the Web in its next generation.

Let’s start with the fact that we already know that we will have a much faster infrastructure shortly.  The Internet 2 system is already running in universities around the country and it is blazingly fast – some say over 100 times as fast – as what we use currently.  As we gain speed, we will also increase the availability of access because anyone that has a building will provide free access because they will have to; to not supply that connection will be to drive off 95% of the human race that will depend on immersive access.  This is not even hard to project it is so obvious.

Less obvious will be the impact of software and infrastructure standards on the Web.  Most users would not have an appreciation for the fact that we are still living in a world today where we have four different major browsers that are not compatible, and a complete jumble of back end technologies that provide the Web applications we run on.  Our current lack of standards makes it hard for developers to write software quickly and make it work for everyone.  The jumble of back-end technologies does a great job of crippling the ability to turn ideas into reality without month’s worth of testing and bug fixing across the competing designs.  A number of groups are working on a set of standards that would allow developers to write on piece of software and be assured that it will work on any computer flawlessly.  The will serve to speed up the pace of development and it is already moving pretty fast!

Another observation is that the browser and the desktop will become more and more the same.  In other words, you will be able to get on the Internet from any device and the desktop that you see will be completely Web-based but will appear more and more like your current Windows or Mac desktop.  This will cause users to become un-tethered from a specific machine and will become a critical front end for the cloud computing wave that is coming at us quickly.  Already I am starting to use my iGoogle screen as kind of desktop because it provides me all the widgets I need, and also gives me access to applications like email and Google Docs applications.  In other words, it has what I used to run from my Windows desktop in years past. I can sit down at any computer and log in to my Google desktop and BANG, I have access to my docs and email – and all the handy widgets I use.  Google provides the applications, the storage, and the front end – for free basically.

I will give you more thoughts on the Second Generation in a few days…

Scott