The Internet is NOT Boring, Mark Cuban
Not sure if Mark Cuban is still pissed the Dallas Mavericks choked during the NBA Finals but his post that the Internet is boring makes him sound like a grumpy old man. I'm not a multi-billionaire like Cuban who hit the entrepreneurial jackpot during the dot-com boom by selling by his start-up, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo but I've been on the Web since 1995, and it seems as interesting to me as ever. Cuban claims it's become a public utility but look at the progress that has been made in the past few years. We've gone from using dial-up to super-fast broadband; we've gone from a Web where you just received information to one where you can do thousands of things, whether it's banking, vacation planning, sharing photos or making donations. Cuban dismisses blogging but when was last time a mass communications tool with little or no barriers to entry hit the mainstream? Mark, it's a nice rant but you can't be totally serious to claim the Internet is more than “just a utility to deliver the digital bits” created by entrepreneurs or kids. To be honest, you need to step back from the fire and realize how many people have little clue about the Web's capability and power.
Update: Fred Wilson doesn't think the Internet is boring either.
July 13th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
If the Internet were boring, then I would have trouble making it thru the workday
July 13th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
But it WILL be.
When the big boys get DRM on your hard drive and remove net neutrality, the Internet will become another big push media. You'll need a licence to be on it and another to run a web site.
You watch. 5 years tops.
July 23rd, 2006 at 1:17 pm
I can see what he's saying, in the infrastructure side - the bit that traditional ISP's and TCP/IP people deal with. Yes the edges are getting faster and that's having an impact on the applications and media that people use.
But, in the infrastructure side nothing interesting is happening. There's no move to IPv6, and interesting protocols like multicast have failed. The most interesting stuff I've seen are VOIP (which has been happening for what seems like ages) and the wireless stuff.
I just think it's proof that the fun stuff is moving up the stack. That's where the creativity and entrepreneurs are going to be now and in the future. Power, pipes and ping will be for the Telcos and the large Media Providers only.