The history of the Internet hasn't begun yet. What we're seeing now is prehistory. But this fun-and-games period will come to an end when someone comes up with an application that really matters.

Technologies that matter make daily life less obnoxious, and you can leverage them all the time. The Net is going to start mattering in a significant way when it relieves people of the burden of dealing with the garbage inherent in the information flow of everyday life. The Net is going to matter when I can rely on it to store the information I now keep on disk, and the computer is a completely transparent object. I plug in one computer, I see through it to the object that matters to me, and I have my entire information life on-line, in chronological order, searchable from my electronic birth certificate onward. All the documents important to me are maintained by the Net with sufficient reliability that I can unplug my computer and smash it with a hammer without affecting anything. I can walk up to any computer anywhere and focus it on my own life stream, my own information object. A laptop will begin to look like a Winnebago; it will be a little eccentric to carry one around.

The Net is going to matter when all of my information transactions with the outside world go through it. I buy an object of some sort and can find the owner's manual on it; all my bills and correspondence go through it; I can save snapshots and videos on it; and it serves as my appointment calendar and electronic diary. At that point the Net isn't going to look glitzy. It's going to be transparent, like central heating: You can easily forget it, but it will be hard to picture life without it.

The most important way people are going to make money on the Net is on the model of utility companies, by providing a service that you pay for monthly. I'm going to hire a server to manage all my documents, and I'll be happy to pay $12.50 a month for an absolutely reliable storage facility. This company will store my documents, support all sorts of fancy searches, and make my documents available anywhere.

We aren't moving in that direction now. A big transition has to happen: People need to get over their childish excitement, stop playing games, and get serious.

A lot of work has been done on electronic newspapers. But they've failed to attract a large audience because they haven't given the public anything that's worth money compared with paper newspapers. An electronic newspaper has to be designed by someone who grasps why a paper newspaper is a great technology: it's cheap, it's portable, and it fits in my briefcase. I can spread it out on a table and read it while I drink coffee and eat a doughnut. A company that's going to make money on electronic newspapers will have to come up with something completely different.