2009 - A Good Year for the Internet
As the World Economy struggles to calculate just how much money there is in the world, we're facing a unique recession. I have reasons to believe that this will be a very good year for the Internet, with more people (in percentage) using it and for a wider range of purposes.
I, for one, am excited to see what will happen with the economy this year. It sucks for me just as much as everybody, but hey, we can't stop learning. There have been recessions in the past, but this one is the biggest so far and affects more people and nationalities than ever before. However, this recession is happening at a time when the human race is more informed than before, especially about the economy and how it progresses through time. While it is hard to predict when the recession will end or how much worse it can get, one guaranteed outcome is the need for Public Regulation. Barack Obama will to do it and the rest of the world will follow in placing controls on financial transactions so as to catch wrongdoing and risky behavior. These systems will certainly need more trust relationships to be enforced (more use for the Internet), which will lead to enhanced security and a wider adoption of the Internet as a medium for commerce.
In some places, though, the Internet might take a step or two back. Buying stocks and securities programmatically will probably be slowed down if not completely banned. In the current market, most people buy and sell their stocks manually. Thus, automatic buying of monetary instruments by smart, algorithmically and statistically sound computers gives an unfair advantage to a minority of people involved in the Economy, making the rich exponentially richer and the poor ever poorer. This article about the fallacies of some financial models hints at the problem with Programmatic Finance: that probabilistic models of monetary instrument values cannot be trusted to make autonomous buying decisions at lightning-fast speeds. Governments will probably be forced to make people (and not their computers) think before they buy or sell.
Whether or not Change (read it in big bold flashy letters) will happen in the economy, it is guaranteed that most of the world population will have less money to spend. Hence, cheaper products will be in greater demand than before. In this recession, many economic entities that were predominantly relying on a single industry will find themselves facing problems of over-supply and will have to search for buyers aggressively. On the other side, any consumer or business buying products will go to great lengths to ensure the most cost-effective purchase. For both buyers and sellers, hence, the Internet will prove crucial to success because it is the only medium connecting business at a global scale. The fighting of political campaigns on the Internet (reference: the McCain-Obama dance-off video and a bajillion others on Youtube) is a trustworthy indicator of the fact that the Internet Public is reaching critical mass. This critical mass which can access the Internet will this year use it more and more for commerce and will create new tools for the process. My hypothesis is favored by a recent article about how the online retailer Amazon had their 'Best-Ever' holiday season.
The computer remains the only truly free interface to almost any produced content (through file-sharing networks and media-centered websites like youtube, and MySpace), and as people get poorer they will be forced to pirate content over the Internet. Content publishers will usually be more lax about piracy because any publicity is good publicity and catching pirates costs money. The Internet will rule as a favored media source for legally and illegally obtained content, second only to TV which continues its descend from idiot box to the All-Day Advertising Machine.
Despite the troubled economy, laptop sales have been increasing and cell phones are reaching near-ubiquity. I think everything points to a general feeling that regardless of supply and demand, Information Technology is going to be an even more interesting craft and an exciting business opportunity this year. That's why I'm not giving up programming for a while.
