The Internet is “disappearing”; it’s going away...

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Written by Rejean Bourgault (Canada); Edited by Olivier Adam (France), Co-founders of 5Deka Inc. – All Rights Reserved

This was a headline in Financial Times (FT-IT Review) on March 7th 2001:

When the internet “disappears”, you know it has arrived, a viewpoint from Ed Zander, President and COO of Sun Microsystems. I was in Hong Kong at that time and when I read this article, I thought it was very fascinating.

Ed Zander was adding: “The internet is going away in the same sense that electricity and plumbing did in the 20th century – out of sight and out of mind”. Ed Zander was right, and indeed internet has disappeared; especially for the Generation Y and Cyber.

Here is a good example, from my day to day life during the summer of 2009 to illustrate what Ed Zander was saying. As you might know by now, my family loves mountain bike racing. Saturday night at the dinner table with my wife, our 3 children and my mother-in-law, we were planning our training day planned for the next day, Sunday and we were discussing as well about the upcoming race scheduled for the next Wednesday. We were wondering what would be the weather for the upcoming days and I then simply asked my oldest daughter to look at the weather forecast. 

The interesting part began there... My oldest daughter (14) left the dinner table and went to the home family computer to look for the weather forecast. At the same time, my son (10) said right away: “Dad, I can get it much faster than her using my Wii (Nintendo Wii)” and he raced to the basement to check. My Mother-in-law on her side (65) raced to the living room and started to search for the TV remote control while my wife decided to look around for the newspaper…

Guess who won?