As we’ve all seen, Internet technology
has become a dominant factor in
business, academia, and everyday life.
E-commerce and e-services are fueling
a market sea change, with practically
any business anyplace nurturing its
equivalent on the Internet. The change
began with advertisements and news,
followed by entertainment (with music
and movies) and traditional businesses,
such as retail sales, financing, brokerage,
and auctions. Now, entirely new
businesses and services are created on
and for the Internet. As a consequence,
Internet service providers and application
service providers have created a
revolutionary new model for driving
new applications, hardware, and software
development.
More globally, the recent AOL–
Time-Warner merger revolutionizes
our perception of future business, making
us all wonder who will dominate
tomorrow’s businesses. If an Internet
company that was lightly regarded—if
not ridiculed and abused for its poor
service just a few years ago—can buy
one of the pre-Internet giants, where
will the changes stop?
On a different front, much of today’s
research revolves around the Internet.
Networking teams explore how to
bring big pipes that last mile to homes,
while others explore operating systems
within the context of Web servers or
look to agent technology for help with
Web interfaces and search techniques.
Internet research has made itself felt
most profoundly through startups. A
number of university research projects
ended up in products coming from
startups, usually as products for the
Web, such as Akamai or Inktomi. The
open-source community is another relevant
factor in this arena, while the
Linux operating system and Apache
Web server are the most widely represented
systems in Web serving.
The Internet’s impact on everyday
life is also fascinating. The other day,
my wife and I received a Web greeting
card through Yahoo—animated, too!
It is much easier to reach me by e-mail
than by phone. Like most of my colleagues,
I do not search for academic
papers in libraries, but rather on the
Web. There, I also do spell checking,
follow my favorite basketball teams on
the NBA’s Web site, and buy books
and computers at Amazon.com and
buy.com among many other sites.
WebVan offers groceries online in the
San Francisco Bay area and other companies
offer clothing. “If it is not on out
on the Internet, it ain’t there” :-).
Unfortunately, the Internet has also
opened some dark doors, including
privacy invasion, pornography, and
information abuse, to name a few—
problems that existed in the presence
of traditional technologies and that
will have to be fought with traditional
and new ways.
In this installment, we feature some
of the people who have brought the
Internet technical revolution to you:
Erik Brewer of Inktomi and the University
of California at Berkeley, Fred
Douglis of AT&T Labs–Research,
Peter Druschel of Rice University, Gary
Herman of HP Labs, Franklin Reynolds
of Nokia, and Munindar Singh of North
Carolina State University.
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