If I have learned one thing in the last few years of being involved in the internet world, its don't try and predict the future... and don't think what folks in this business say one day will still hold true the next... just look back to Bill Gates' prediction in 1995 that the Microsoft Network would *be* the internet by now.

This year Mr. gates is being a little more circumspect about his predictions (link to his home page predictions), taking the radical point of view that more businesses will use email in 1997. Although his column is called Out On A Limb, its more like a recitation of what he read in Wired magazine this year... or maybe the year before.

So, what will happen during 1997? Rather than predict, I'd rather say what I hope will happen if we all take a slight dose of realism.

One of the big news events of 96 was the Apple Death watch... Wall Street pundits who can barely use their own PCs declared apple dead... again. They did the same thing back in 1995 if you recall. But now -- belatedly -- Apple has taken some steps towards better business practices by buying Next Software... a company headed up by the man who started Apple... Steve Jobs... the same man who apple fired not so long ago. Whether beefing up apple's aging operating system with the modern components of Next will indeed help apple's stock head back up is anyone's guess. My sister called the other day to ask whether she should still buy a Macintosh or wait until the Next version of the apple Operating system comes out... I believe now is a great time to buy a Mac... we're still buying them in my office... so are millions of other people... lets hope 1997 is the *last* year we have to deal with Apple death watch stories.

Another of my desires for this year actually stems from something my boss is fond of saying: those of us in the world wide web business have an obligation not to overhype the medium. The web is, is most ways, a new thing... companies and people are just beginning to understand how to best use the web to communicate. we're all learning and while some folks are smarter than others about what their web sites look like, you can be sure that by year's end the web will have reinvented itself several times. I hope 1997 brings reasonable expectations of this great new medium... it won't solve all of your problems and probably won't radically alter your life in the next 12 months... no the web's effect will come slowly over the next few years, ironic given the fast paced nature of change online. If there's one thing we learned from the proliferation of presidential election web sites, it's that while they may be educational, their influence isn't revolutionary. The whole thing was, like all things online, a great learning experience.

Also in 1997, I'm hoping that we'll see fewer ways of hooking into the internet. Strange I know from someone with a high speed digital phone line in his house. Cable modems, new 56K modems, digital phone lines, ISDN, ADSL, satellite dishes. How can any of us expect home users to make these kinds of choices... heck the folks building these things don't have a clue which technology will win, and I'm sure not going to be the one to tell my mom she should buy a $500 internet deal from the cable company when it might need to be replaced in by Christmas. We can safely say internet access will get pretty darn fast by year's end... as long as the net itself can keep up. But unless you are desperate for speed, I'd wait a while before I bought one of the fancy new modems. 1997 will probably not be the year we standardize on ways of accessing the net, but I sure wish it would be... otherwise its going to be the year a lot of us buy stuff we end up throwing away next year.

So those are my hopes for 1997. I'm sure Microsoft and Netscape will have great years and inundate us with new browsers... and at some point someone will decide its time to say the Web is dead (again)... about the only thing that constant on the web is that none of us can predict what'll happen with anything even close to certainty. Maybe 1997 will make web pundits a little more honest about what the average user wants and more importantly can afford in this digital revolution.