The Web Will Disappear

Mike Walsh, one of the world-famous futurists, came to Istanbul for SAS Business Analytics Series 2012. Walsh said "Web will disappear," and told the future of the web and effects on business life to hurriyet.com.tr. 

Social media is getting bigger everyday and it becomes a vital part of our lives. What kind of opportunities do you think social media is offering to us?  We are accelerating to a critical point in time when the significant majority of the world's population will not only be online, they will be connected to each other. At this point everything changes - how we communicate, how we discover brands, how we entertain ourselves, how we elect our governments, and ultimately how we represent ourselves to other people. What that really means is that whether you are the CEO of a company or the leaders of a country - you should not think about social media as a fad, but truly a human revolution.

How will digital future will change our lives and business life? I believe that the world's most valuable resource in the near future will not be oil or gold - but data. For many companies, data is still a cost - but things are changing. The brands and platforms of the future will leverage consumer data to get smarter about how they market and create unique, personalised user experiences for their customers.Today we worry about privacy. Tomorrow we will complain when companies are not smart enough to know what we want before we have to ask for it.

How do you see the future of web? The Web will disappear. Tomorrow's children will not even remember what it was to 'go online' - they will never be offline. We will not sit down to access the web through 'browsers' - our devices, screens and appliances will be constantly connected to a ubiquitous network that never leaves us. The most successful companies in this time may not necessarily be Facebook, Google or Apple. They will face the same challenges that AOL, Microsoft and IBM faced in the 90s. Whether companies survive or thrive in the future depends on their ability to really understand what consumers want, and be strong and swift enough to give it to them.

This article appear in Turkish newspaper ‘Hurriyet’ and based on the answers above.