How the Web was lost? Analysis/Commentary The World Wide Web is gaining popularity with the mainstream, but it ceases to have unified direction. Too many competing interests claim ownership and try to navigate its destiny, which perhaps at this point, is random. Not to worry. Complex life often has its elements of randomness. If fish hadn't evolved into reptiles, reptiles into mammals, and mammals into -- oh, well, you know the rest. Recently, however, we can't say the Web has evolved into this or that -- or even this from that. Like a jumbled soup of leftovers, it tastes like yesterday's dinner and the one before, flavored with fresh spices. Who, then, are the parties jockeying for direction on the Web? Commercial interests, for one. Companies that once did business in the "real" world learn to redistribute their offerings on the Web. This leads at once to cannibalization of existing resources, so-called real businesses morphing into new profit and distribution schemes, and perhaps even a new economy. Second, intellectual interests. The media, for all its misguided zeal, offers a reflection of the mentality of the times, the thought processes of the masses. These, while eager for comfort and for vapid entertainment, seem nevertheless also attracted to knowledge. News is one form of knowledge, fashion tips another, and consumer information a third. Perhaps the amount of genuine inquirers on the Web increases, people who learn to appreciate good books, read abstracts or scientific papers, and delve beyond the everyday to break the patterns of their usually constrained personal education. But they are still too few. Third, industrial interests. Microsoft and Netscape continue to develop their browsers in keeping with the growth of chips, hard disks, caches, and modems, but content hardly keeps up with software or hardware. Why? Perhaps because software and hardware entrepreneurs want to minimize the capabilities of networks. After all, who would buy spreadsheet programs if conventional peripherals were to suddenly evaporate? Fourth, educational interests. Knowledge, once for its own sake, seems to currently dissolve into employment grooming. Most schooling leads to specialized niches, where self-marketing gets confused with ability. The geeks have discovered business, and in doing so, learn to play it safe -- to create robotic pursuits and numeric rating systems at the expense of traditional creativity. Are we breeding a race of collators? Fifth, government interests. The nineties technology revolution generated enough taxes to balance the annual budget and trimmed the bureaucratic machine. Computers replaced the pencil pushers in government, the sinecured sycophants who once turned the cogs of political machines and covered themselves in mounds of paper. The Web opened up all that. But will these interests ever learn to communicate with one another? Businessmen don't understand technocrats, political leaders don't understand today's marketing men, and industrialists still haven't figured out which way the economy is going. The various factions use yesterday's indicators to gauge progress in an economy that promises prosperity to some, dislocation to others, and unease to the population at large. Will the masses learn to stop worrying and love the Web? Will business learn to self-regulate? And will intellectuals find their bearings and industry fall into lockstep with progress? Possibly, the business activities of the Web will sort themselves out. But where the Web will ultimately go, no one can say for sure. December 22, 1999