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In 1995 What Were They Thinking This was written in 2006: Eleven years ago, Netscape's IPO revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO… nothing about the Web… the day after everything. Updating some files (2009) and happened across this, how the world has changed, things written here have come to pass and more, who could have thought the social media, social networking would be the force it is today. Yet how many have still not "got" what the Web is about, are they to be as stated "The illiterate of tomorrow will not be those that cannot read. It will be those that refuse to learn" In 1945 Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush in his paper "As we may think" outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - because he saw the need for a better way to share the knowledge the world had accumulated. The world had to wait 25 years until inter-connecting computers became a reality although the sharing of information was primitive by today's standards but it was the start of the Internet A further 20 years on and Tim Berners-Lee created the world wide web, the first browser, for no other reason than to better facilitate the sharing of information. So the revolution launched by Netscape's IPO in 1995 was only marginally about hypertext. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking found nowhere else in history. Did we fail to imagine what the Web would become. Are we are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into and as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, are we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Whether you are in business or the man in the street, the web is not going to go away. It is not that thing out there, to be dismissed as something that doesn't concern you. Ignore it at your peril. The invention of the printing press gave rise to literacy. There now was a reason to learn to read. The Web gave us a vehicle and the invention of the browser gave us the means to speedily share knowledge. People want to learn, they want information, it is part of the human condition In eleven years the world has changed, we can never go back. Look forward to the next ten years of change and be prepared to go with it. The illiterate of tomorrow will not be those that cannot read. It will be those that refuse to learn. Contact Us