Bet 216
Duration 10 years (02005-02015)
PREDICTOR
Robert Frates
CHALLENGER
Unchallenged
I believe this to be the natural course of growth for a revenue stream born of marketable mass communication technologies.
Several if not all of the prominent technologies evolved as products or services following a similar life cycle. Telephony, Radio and Broadcast Television have all gone from a 'hi-fi', wave-o-the-future, curiosity to a lucrative gumbo of broad spectrum bottom feeding business ventures.
Once saturated, they inevitably become focused and specialized by first returning to grassroots, value-added, and loss-leading outlet chain and ultimately to the holy grail of members only, premium, platinum, targeted yet customizable, best-of-the-best, world-class, and modestly priced line of personal packages. Modular features and more ways to add your own tolerance of viscuous ethernet fat than it would take to bring the internet back to what it was before it was courageously stripped down in the name of individual privacy and security.
The consumer's inner lemming will actually demand and revere this brave endeavor. All while pouring their nest egg into the family connectivity score. BTW, FCS will replace the current credit reporting system within a similar time frame. Society will have the pingable class and the offline outcasts. But that's a whole other prediction. ;)