Technology often delivers unexpected outcomes that no one foresees. On the other hand, the most significant advances were frequently predicteddecades ago. Vannevar Bush proposed the "Memex" in 1945, a single device that would hold all books, records, and communications and mechanically connect them by association. This idea was then utilized to construct the concept of "hypertext" (a term coined two decades later), which aided the development of the World Wide Web (developed another two decades later). Although the "Streaming Wars" has only recently begun, the first streaming video was broadcast more than 25 years ago. Many of the characteristics of this so-called war, such as essentially endless supplies of content, interactivity, dynamic and targeted marketing, on-demand playback, and thebenefit of combining content and delivery, have been speculated about for decades.
In this way, the broad contours of future solutions are frequently anticipated and, in some ways, decided upon well before the technical competence to generate them. Still, it's difficult to foresee how they'll come together, whose characteristics will matter more or less, what governancemodels or competitive dynamics will drive them, or what new experiences will emerge. Much of Hollywood recognized that the future of television was online when Netflix started its streaming service (IP TV had been deployed in the late 1999s). The issue was timing and how to package such a service (Hollywood required another ten years to realize that all its channels, genres, and content needed to be consolidated into a single app/brand). Many in the media industry are still baffled by the popularity of video game broadcasting and YouTubers and the notion that the best way to commercialize material is to give it out for free and charge $0.99 for optional $0.99 things of no consequence. The acquisition of media conglomerate Time Warner by landline internet behemoth AOL was announced in 2000 to bring media and technology/distribution closer together, but it was abandoned in 2009 after failing to deliver many benefits. Nine years later, it was then purchased under the same premise by AT&T, the mobile internet behemoth. While many technologists anticipated a "personal computer," its attributes and timing were so unpredictably unexpected that Microsoft, rather than IBM, dominated the PC era in the 1990s. While Microsoft anticipated mobile, it misjudged the operating system and hardware role, resulting in the global rise of Android and iOS (and Microsoft's shift from the OS layer to the app/services layer). Similarly, Steve Jobs' computing goals were always "right," but they were established too early and on the wrong device. Email and instant messaging were the two most popular uses of the early Internet, but it wasn't until the late 2000s that the value of social apps/networks was acknowledged. Similarly, all of the conditions for creating Facebook existed before to the year 2000; however, Facebook did not arrive until 2005 - and even then, it was by chance. Many in the technology community have imagined a future state of the Internet, if not a quasi-successor to it, called the "Metaverse," since the late 1970s and early 1980s. It would transform not only the digital world's infrastructure but also much of the physical world, as well as all the platforms and services that sit on top of it, how they work, and what they sell.
