James Watt's 1765 steam engine didn't change your life unless you were pumping water out of coal mines. A steam-powered factory could have produced enough goods to supply an entire nation, but since there was no way to distribute that output there wasn't much point in building such a factory. With the railroad came the ability to serve a national market with one factory. Factories grew enormous and pulled people out of the countryside to work inside the Satanic Mills. It was the mounting of the steam engine on rails and the spreading of railroads across nations that transformed society, not the steam engine per se. The computer is the steam engine of our times; the network is the railroad.
With a ubiquitous network, all of the information that you consume will arrive in a machine-readable form. If the information is structured appropriately, as with standards like Electronic Document Interchange (EDI), it will arrive in a form that is immediately applicable to your internal databases without human intervention. Your computer will truly be able to handle routine transactions on your behalf.
Railroad tracks near C&O Canal. Along the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. When the network infrastructure is powerful enough for most houses to enjoy video-rate bandwidth, the computer will be able to support your collaboration with other people. If you had TV-quality video and audio links to your collaborators and a shared workspace, you wouldn't have to commute to work or fly around from city to city so much. Though one does not like to predict the demise of a 3,000-year-old trend toward urbanization, it indeed seems possible that collaboration tools might enable some people to move out to the country yet still keep their urban jobs. Workers in rich countries would be able to employ assistants in low-wage countries; imagine a life-size continuosly active video conferencing system that opened up a wall of your office to a room in another country.
The Internet will change society. Some people will get rich off that change. If you want to be one of them the safest bet is perhaps to figure out where all those telecommuters are going to end up living and open a little mall there with a McDonalds, MicroCenter, Starbucks, and Trader Joe's. However, in case we ever see a resurgence of the late 1990s popular obsession with making money from public Web sites, let's start by considering ways to turn hits into revenue.
