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Internet Industry News

Intranet Takes Off

Well it had to happen, eventually. Microsoft couldn't be happier as IS managers begin to embrace and extend their internal corporate networks with Andy Gove’s bread and butter, the NT server. 1993 may have been the year of the browser as the "killer app". 2000 promises to be the year of the intranet. After 5 years in the making small businesses finally seem ready to deploy Internet technologies on their LANs. Or could it be that Microsoft has worked the bugs out of it’s NT IIS software at last. Certainly big business has been using the Net for quite awhile but primarily as an email backbone and ftp site for software developers.

This year promises to put more applications in the browser, well at least make them browser accessible.

The big three, Microsoft, Netscape and Sun all are pushing the intranet. Of course Microsoft has seen the light and is attacking the intranet at home. Netscape hopes to entice you to build your own virtual private network with it’s virtual office solution. And Sun. Well they’re still planning to conquer the world one-server-at-a-time.

Hot Topics

VPN - virtual private networks let you collaborate using the Internet as an extension of your own network.

E-commerce - like the video phone, 20 years in the making, made and still not ubiquitous ... this will be the year e-commerce takes off. Maybe.

Net Access - for small business this a hot topic. How will they connect? Do they really want or need to connect their LANS?

Security - continues to be required. This is not your father’s Internet. Learn to use PGP.

Mailing Lists - with the death of Usenet mailing lists will become more essential than ever before.

MAPS-RBL - Buy Paul Vixie a beer or donate to his favorite charity he’s found a way to stop SPAM by becoming the SPAM police.

Cold Topics

E-mail - we need it. It works. And no we don’t need the US Postal service to stamp our e-mail. Nice try though.

Net-backups - right I’m going to send a GB of harddrive data to a server on the Internet. Forget it! Buy a Jaz drive, go to the beach and save yourself some time and money.

VRML - whatever happened to VRML? Perhaps one day we the people will have computers powerful enough to actually make it a reality. Too bad Intel’s just not there yet. But soon.

Usenet News - it was pretty useful once upon a time. Thomas Boutell would like to rescue it but that seems too much to ask.

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