Which is funny, because Forrester’s main rival, International Data Corp., essentially said this right in the piece. “The web is the dirt road, the basic structure,” IDC analyst Michael Sullivan-Trainor said. “The concept that you can kill the Web and start from square one is ridiculous. We are talking about using the Web, evolving it.”
Can you see the underlying fault with his commentary? He basically assumed that Web technology would never improve and would be replaced with something else—when what actually happened is that the Web eventually integrated everything he wanted, plus more.
In another piece during the same period, he made clear that the problem he saw was that the Web just didn’t go far enough. “We will not reach an Internet economy of this size with today’s technology,” he said at a company-sponsored event, according to The National Post .
In 1997, the Forrester founder was quoted in Network World , implying that the Web was just not the horse to get us to the next stage of digital nirvana. Instead, he implied that Java would take over online. (See, if he had said JavaScript, he would have been right. But plain-jane Java? Not so much. As far as consumer-facing experiences go, Flash ate its lunch.)
Colony was one of the few beating this drum. While Saffo and Stoll kind of faded into history a little (though Stoll’s commentary has modern-day defenders ), Colony kept it up.
His quotes are referenced in context with two related haters—Clifford Stoll, author of Silicon Snake Oil, and Paul Saffo, then the director of the Institute of the Future. Each had deeper underlying points. Stoll criticized its social failings; Saffo suggested the Web was too one-directional. Colony, meanwhile, just felt the Web was too static. Computers could do more.
Another critic, technology analyst George Colony, has focused on the graphical part of the Internet, the World Wide Web. He pooh-poohs the system, saying “The Web is Dead,” because it is not very interactive.
But there’s one area where the company—particularly Colony—gets it wrong. And it has to do with the World Wide Web, which Colony declared “dead” or dying on numerous occasions over a 30-year period. In each case, Colony was trying to make a bigger point about where online technology was going, without giving the Web enough credit for actually being able to get there.
Colony’s name may not ring a bell if you’re not in technology spaces, but he is the founder of Forrester Research , one of the largest tech and business advisory firms in the world. If you’re a journalist with a story and need an analyst, you’ve probably talked to someone from Forrester. I’ve talked to Forrester quite a few times—their analysis is generally quite sound.
Zeldman’s critique is simple , and one that I can definitely appreciate: People have been declaring the Web dead as long as it’s been alive (and the comments have been hilariously wrong). I’d like to take a moment to consider one specific naysayer: George Colony.
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