Is IE gonna die....?

I was reading an article about the upcoming promised IE 9: http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/03/microsoft-to-double-down-on-html5-with-internet-explorer-9/

As it is clear, Microsoft is running behind the facts and not setting the standards anymore (regarding browser technology). If Microsoft will not keep up with the technology, IE will die, because people will drop it in favor of faster and better browsers.

Currently I think more and more people are using a non IE browser at their personal hardware, due to different reasons. The one and only place where IE still rules is the corporate/business hardware. Personally this is one the reasons why IE has still a big market share. As mentioned in my previous posts, business software eventually follows what people use at home (matter of being used to....). Loosing market share on personal/home computers will hurt IE very hard...eventually, as it will take some time, but it will happen.
Maybe it will happen even faster, as more and more web developers in corporate operations, are actually using Chrome and Firefox during development. Users/testers will be aware of this and they would like to have the same speed and functionality as the developers. As more business solutions are converted/created as web applications this can have a big impact and would be able to speed up the process of killing IE in the business environment.

To conclude, if Microsoft does not take real action and just tries to keep up with the developments, their browser will die. (It even feels like this time Microsoft is the WordPerfect/Lotus123 they have killed years ago)

Domination of the web

Just read an article on techcrunch that Sean Parker thinks that the web will be dominated by Facebook/Twitter and not google:

To be clear, he thinks Google will stay huge and relevant, but it’s dominance will go down because collecting data is less valuable than connecting people, he said.

I have to disagree with this.

1. I still believe that Facebook and Twitter (and any other major social service) is currently over-hyped. In the future the hype will disappear and the dying process will start.
   As long as google delivers the best search experience, it will never die. Finding information on the net is an essential part of surfing the web.
   
   
2. It is also a matter of time until the success of social website will hurt itself. People are still not aware of the privacy issues involved with it; every day I see more and more FAIL pictures of facebook updates. When the users realize that everything they say/post/publish is stored forever with the possibility that it can be used against you, the frequency of use will become less.
   
   
3. If you want to spot the next big thing for the future, you need to look at the teenagers, as they are the future. I remember that these social sites are not very strongly presented in this age category. This is also correct when I look around me. I believe the current social sites are focused on the 25+ to 45 age range. This means either when the teenager become older they will start using the current social sites or they will laugh at it and invent/continue with their own technology. (see also point 6)
   
   
4. As this guy mentions, Connecting people is the future relevance of being dominant, I don't think so. Connecting people has always existed during the existence of the internet. In my youth it was something called IRC. Great tool to chat and meet people. In my time and area I think it was even more popular then the current social sites. It still exists and is used widely I guess, but as mentioned in point 1 the hypes goes over and it gets into coma.Other old examples are ICQ, MSN, Skype, etc.... All still exist and all do their work but they were never able to dominate the web. This brings us to point 5.
   
   
5. I think this guy doesnt understand the web. The web is much much more than a way of communication between people. Just of because of this social sites can not dominate. They are trends of the internet, like trends of color. Suppose the most trendy color currently is red (eg. 80% of cars/dresses/etc are red), I believe you cannot say that all important things in the future will be of the color red. It will be for a time, but then the next color will come...etc. But google is the freaking color spectrum itself... no matter what the trend is, it will always be on top of that.
   
   
6. The future is the mobile web and google/apple understand this. Teenagers mostly use mobile devices to communicate directly (mostly with SMS messages in europe). It is just a matter of time until the internet connectivity speeds and costs will be low enough for people to massively use it. Once this happens, the usage of internet will shift to the mobile world. Collecting data and presenting it (as this guy mentions what google does) will become even more bigger then now. People will want to have information anywhere at any time. I think Augmented reality is a good example of a future technology which will be very big. No matter how social a human is, at the end the world evolves around its self. Finding the information to help him/her a step further will always overrule the social aspect.

As a conclusion I would expect that the current social sites will still be big and can only stay big if they become part of the cloud, allowing future users to integrate their services with other services. This is also where google expels and will unless it doesnt become evil, will dominate the future :)