A Team Boston Newsletter

The Next Century Cont  2

The Next Century Cont  3

The Next Century Cont  4

What the Next Century Will Look Like...

At the beginning of each year, the SUN
dedicates an edition to forecasting trends
which may effect our lives and businesses.
Team Boston has continuously reinforced
via the Planets of the Galaxy (e.g. the Lost
World, the New Millennium) that
understanding our shifting industry will allow
us to better manage our destiny. The Global
Network and the Trend Letter identified the
following trends.

Trend #1

The Internet is the single most important
development of the 20th century, and it will
shape the development of the 21st century in
ways we can't imagine now.

The Internet is changing all the rules. That's the most important piece of information you can carry into the next century. Nothing else
--at least no other technological innovation
--will play as great a role in the future
development of the global village as the
continued explosive growth and reach of
the World Wide Web.

The changes that will be brought about by
the Internet in the next century touch every
part of our lives:

§ The way we work and whom we work
with. Cross-border collaborations between
work teams in distant countries will be commonplace, as global corporate partners build new organizations
through cooperative product development and
distribution.

§ Internet in self-paced modules that will enable
people to learn at their own pace. Universities will
serve students of disparate educational backgrounds as the four-year, on-campus degree track gives way to life-long learning and ongoing skills development.

§ The way we build personal relationships and how we maintain them. Communities of like-minded people will gather in cyberspace to form virtual relationships.

By 2020, every single community will be wired to
the World Wide Web, and access will be
considered a right, not a privilege, as governments
around the globe tear down barriers to usage.

The people who will be most dramatically affected by widespread use of the Internet will be the young people who are today not yet in school-and their
children and their children's children.

And they also are the ones who will exploit the Web
to its fullest potential just as industrialists exploited
interstate highways and railways, and the computer
industry exploited telephone lines.

The cohort that is now in college is the last
demographic group whose lives will not be
totally altered by the Internet. The children now in elementary school don't think about the Net, it's
just there for their use. It's a tool-