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Get ready for the post-PC, post-Web world

Kevin Werbach for CNET News.com CNET News

Published: 22 May 2003 13:30 BST

Technologists just can't stop thinking about tomorrow. The future always looks bright; the question is who and what will help get us there. Even the grinding downturn of the past three years has hardly dampened this belief among entrepreneurs, technology executives and investors.

Will broadband be the hot new development that lifts us out of the doldrums? Will it be Wi-Fi? Online gaming? Web services? Homeland security? Those are the wrong questions.

If you want to know where you are, you don't study a map to determine where you're going. You trace back the steps from where you've been. Over the past several years, "where we've been" in the technology world has changed. While we were all focused on the dot-com bubble and the subsequent bust, "yesterday" shifted. It used to be the PC revolution and client-server computing in the enterprise; now it's the Web.

Mosaic, the first commercial Web browser, was introduced a decade ago. The Web is yesterday's technology. That doesn't mean it's going away, any more than the graphical user interface, which was a decade old when Mosaic was introduced, or the PC itself, which dates to the 1970s. Yesterday's technology is pervasive and mature today. It's an indispensable part of our personal and business lives. But it is no longer the driver of growth and innovation it was in its heyday.

The basics of the new today are that powerful digital devices are becoming pervasive and inexpensive; they're becoming commodities. Services are available networked across the Internet and use common software. The world is heterogeneous, complex and decentralised.

Companies now worry less about how fast their computers run and more about how well they work together. People no longer wonder whether something is available online, but rather how to find and make use of it. Companies worry less about how to move large numbers of units, whether it is songs or laptops, and spend more time thinking about how to make money doing so. Those are today's challenges.