The two most telling stories about the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall actually ran in the business sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post.
One was a short article in the back pages of The New York Times that reported that the number of adults using the Internet in the United States had surpassed 100 million, meaning that roughly half the U.S. population is now online.The other article, in The Post, noted that Amazon.com was shipping an extraordinary number of copies of Adolf Hitler's racist manifesto, "Mein Kampf," to buyers in Germany.
What these two little stories tell is that 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall a whole other set of walls is starting to fall, as we move deeper into the Internet revolution. And this is not simply an American phenomenon, nor, as the "Mein Kampf" example illustrates, will it automatically bring out the best in people.
So what comes next? With the first phase of this wall-destroying Internet revolution -- the e-mail and e-commerce phase -- now fully under way, I posed that question to John Chambers. Chambers runs Cisco Systems, which makes the routers that run the Internet. Beware: He has an obvious stake in touting the Internet. But note: His past predictions have proved extremely accurate.
Chambers argued that the second phase of the Internet revolution -- businesses absorbing the Internet and using it to relate to one another -- was now just getting under way and that this was going to be a monster market. There is barely a CEO in the developed world who in the past six months hasn't said to himself: "Oh my gosh! This Internet thing is real. Somebody call me an Internet doctor and wire me up."
Once a CEO understands that absorbing the Net into every aspect of his or her business "is the only way they are going to survive," said Chambers, "they are going to be spending big bucks on it."
So now that commerce has moved to the Net, and the Net is moving into business, what comes after that?
"Education," said Chambers. "The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error" in terms of the Internet capacity it will consume.
What will drive it will be the demands on companies, in an intensely competitive global economy, to keep improving productivity.
"Unlike in the industrial revolution when you had to be in the right country or city to participate, in this new era capital will flow to whichever countries and companies install the best Internet and educational capabilities," Chambers said.
Governments and unions will be powerless to stop this capital flow, which will affect the global balance of economic power. Although the technology exists today, this revolution will take about 10 years to be fully in place. But, insists Chambers, "it's coming next."
New York Times News Service