1995 Internet Curmudgeon Time Machine
I stumbled upon a great Newsweek article from 1995 entitled “Why Web Won’t Be Nirvana.” It includes such gems as:
- People will never order airline tickets online, make restaurant reservations online, or negotiate sales contracts online.
- People will never consume books and newspapers over the internet.
- E-commerce will never work because there’s no secure way to send money online and you need salespeople.
- And much, much more…
The purpose of this blog post isn’t to poke fun at the author, who was wrong on nearly every point. In fairness, I’m sure we’ve all said things that sounded ridiculous 15 years later, and perhaps a little curmdgeonry would have useful during the internet bubble. The point of this post is to show how quickly and dramatically the internet can change and how far we still have to go.
The future has a wild imagination
The thing is, in 1995 these predictions weren’t entirely unreasonable. In fact, if anything seemed unreasonable it would have been to predict what actually happened. Who really thought that travel agents would soon go extinct, newspapers would be on the verge of bankruptcy, and e-commerce would rival shopping malls? Yet that’s exactly what happened. Then insurmountable problems like securely sending money over the internet now seem trivial.
Still in the Stone Age
It’s easy to look at the internet today and think we’ve reached nirvana, but things are still surprisingly primitive when you think about it.
Many people are still choosing lawyers based on the largest Yellow Page ads and spending less time researching doctors online than vacations. For professionals, many are still questioning whether the internet even matters. And, of course, we can’t forget an awkward little tool, considered at the bleeding edge of social media, that forces you to speak in 140 character blurbs peppered with cryptic symbols.
We’re not there yet
We still have a long way to go, and you can bet the internet of 2010 is going to seem downright primitive compared to the internet of 2025, but one thing remains constant – we’ll always have curmudgeons.
