{"id":810,"date":"2011-07-18T15:51:51","date_gmt":"2011-07-18T14:51:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/2011\/turning-points\/"},"modified":"2011-07-18T15:51:51","modified_gmt":"2011-07-18T14:51:51","slug":"turning-points","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/2011\/turning-points\/","title":{"rendered":"Turning Points"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt\" class=\"MsoNormal\">A regular correspondent of mine just posed an interesting question: &#8220;The Web has significantly evolved over the past 15 years. What have been the major milestones in the web&#8217;s evolution either in business or technology?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt\" class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt\" class=\"MsoNormal\">That&#8217;s quite a big question&hellip; \ud83d\ude42&nbsp; I didn&#8217;t have time for a detailed answer, but came up with the following main &#8220;turning points&#8221;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>1996-7: The &#8220;ubiquitous web&#8221; becomes useful. This was the point at which someone with an average PC and dial-up connection could perform real tasks as well as or better than going to a traditional intermediary, e.g. for booking holidays.<\/li>\n<li>c2003: Composite applications and services start to become a reality (e.g. Amazon marketplaces). This required a number of technological advances (RSS, web services), but also a shift from human-computer to computer-computer interactions. I was never completely convinced about &#8220;web 2.0&#8221;, but in hindsight I suppose this was what it meant.<\/li>\n<li>c2005: The web becomes &#8220;the main way of doing things&#8221; for things like banking, tax &amp; interactions with the government. Before that date I was often frustrated either by not being able to use the web, or frustrated because of the services&#8217; limitations. Since that sort of date I&#8217;ve only had to perform a handful of such transactions by other means, and they&#8217;ve usually been a disaster!<\/li>\n<li>c2009-10: The web starts to deliver on the mobile &#8220;information everywhere&#8221; vision, as per things like Bill Gates&#8217; <em>The Road Ahead<\/em>. It&#8217;s the confluence of decent large-screen hardware, standards-based services and well-designed apps. Put it another way &#8211; this was the point at which the computing in <em>Star Trek, the Next Generation<\/em> started to look out of date, just as the original series did by 1987.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m aware that this is very focused on practical, e-commerce type uses. I&#8217;m not personally convinced that social networking represents a watershed in itself, rather than another exploitation dimension, which probably has a very similar set of milestones. The same is probably true of several other content \/ application areas. <\/p>\n<p>What do you think? Have I nailed it, or have I missed a big one?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A regular correspondent of mine just posed an interesting question: &#8220;The Web has significantly evolved over the past 15 years. What have been the major milestones in the web&#8217;s evolution either in business or technology?&#8221; &nbsp; That&#8217;s quite a big &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/2011\/turning-points\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}