Since the IPO of Netscape in the mid-1990s, the Internet has been the biggest phenomenon in business and society. Although it is impossible to predict when, I feel confident that at some point the Internet will no longer be such an important phenomenon. Sometime, something of greater significance will come along. I have been wondering what that something might be. The more I think about this, the more I realize that fundamentally, the power of the Internet lies in its role as a relatively inexpensive means of global communication.
People can communicate with each other over the Internet for a relatively low price.
In effect, the Internet is being used as a significantly more efficient way to connect people together. Still, there remain significant barriers to communication. There are probably hundreds of different languages in the world. Whenever I go to Asia, I am faced with the difficulty of communicating with people whose primary language is Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Since I don't speak any of these languages, I am generally unsure whether the translators have fully understood the meaning of what I was saying in English and whether they were able to effectively translate what I was saying into the language that the audience members understood.