The internet today forms the backbone of nearly all modern technology, but this wasn’t obvious when it was just starting off as a new service in the 1990s. But someone had correctly predicted how the internet would progress — and how integral it would become to our lives.
Marc Andreessen, who is now a VC but in the 90s was best known as the creator of the Netscape browser, had presciently predicted the progress of the internet all the way back in 1996. He had appeared on the Charlie Rose show — with a full head of hair — and had been asked about the future of the internet.
“The internet is everywhere. In 10 years, we probably won’t even be talking about the internet. We’ll just assume it’s there,” Andreessen had then said.
“So the future of the internet, over the long term, is everyone connected to everyone else over very high speed network and able to do basically anything — learn, play, trade, correspond, anything like that,” he had added.
“And who will have access to it?” Charlie Rose asked. “Hypothetically over the long term, everyone. You’re able to deliver access over ordinary phone lines, you’ll be able to deliver access over cable systems, over wireless, over cellular, any data communications medium — any of the existing voice networks can accommodate it,” he had said.
“A lot of developing countries are gonna jump straight to fiber optic backbones,” he had predicted. “In a lot of developing countries, it’s an economic issue rather than a technology issue. But if they put that new infrastructure in, they’re going to be able to have very high speed connectivity, and jump over the technology in some of the industrialized countries. So it’s purely a matter of economics to see how broadly it gets deployed. The capital cost of deploying it are a number of hundreds of dollars per person,” Andreessen had said.
It’s uncanny how many of these predictions came true. The internet now forms the backbone of all modern tech including phones, laptops, and even some cars, and it’s often easy to forget that it’s even there. Like Andreessen had said, the internet is used for a wide variety of things, including commerce, communication, games and trade. Andreessen had even got the part about developing countries right — developing countries did indeed leapfrog developed countries in internet access, with millions in places like India receiving an internet-enabled smartphone before they had access to a regular landline phone.
These things weren’t obvious in 1996 when the internet was just starting out, and had many skeptics which weren’t convinced of its potential. But it’s perhaps this ability to peer into the future that’s made Marc Andreessen a successful venture capitalist — he does seem to have an ability to peer into the future and discern trends that aren’t immediately apparent to others.