Why The Internet Will Never Take Off

Way back in 1995 an American astronomer, author and teacher by the name of Clifford “Cliff” Stoll, who by all measures is a rather intelligent individual, famously wrote a book entitled “Silicon Snake Oil”. Along with an accompanying article in Newsweek titled “Why the web won’t be Nirvana”.

1995 was a big year for me I was 15 years old, had a fantastic group of friends, and was finally allowed out late at weekends. When we weren’t out on our bikes or building dangerously precarious tree houses out of “black market” pallets and rope, we were either trying (unsuccessfully) to convince the staff at the local pub (The Hare & Hounds) that we were in fact 18, or playing DOOM II on our brand new and very shiny “Pentium” computers. After all, what else would you do with a computer that’s not online?

The internet had in some form or another been around for approaching 20 years, but in reality, it was only just becoming mainstream. It was largely seen as pointless and benign by the majority of our parents. I and my friends had to try every trick in the book to manipulate mum and dad into shelling out for AOL … “I need it to study” was generally the clincher.

It is therefore in my opinion, rather unsurprising that Mr Stoll made his now seemingly naive comments. Looking back today the immediate reaction is one of “Oh My God”, and Cliff himself expressed embarrassment and regret at his “1995 howler”.

Amongst Cliff’s “howlers” were the propositions that no online database would ever replace your daily newspaper, no computer will ever change how government works, and even suggested that due to the awkwardness of searching data on the web, it would never be useful as an information source! Remember this was 3 years before Google even existed!

Cliff went on to conclude his article by saying that e-commerce was never going to happen because there are no trustworthy ways to send money over the internet and “my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire internet handles in a month”.

I don’t write this to give Cliff yet another reminder of his blunder, but rather to provide some solace, and a consolatory statement that Cliff was in fact right about one thing when he stated that “The web won’t be Nirvana”.

After all, in its literal translation from Pali & Sanskrit, Nirvana means “Blown Out” (like a candle) - and I think we can all agree that Cliff at least got this completely right, the internet has far from been blown out just yet!