The Trillion Dollar Question
by Thomas Caldwell

The big question looming over Planet Earth's newest trillion dollar industry is who is going to be making the money, and who will be left holding the bag.

There can be no doubt that money can and is being made on and through the Internet. Programmers who only a few years ago began teaching themselves the obscure, UNIX-based language called Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (better known as HTML) are in big demand. Most of the companies that produce the hardware that make the Net go aren't complaining. Stocks in companies who's fortunes are tied to the medium known as cyberspace are rising and falling, but are seldom inactive, while at the same time, few of these same companies are profitable. Yet all the evidence indicates that something is going on that is bigger than the sum of all the parts.

Ever since humans crawled out of caves, new technologies have been overtaking older ones, relegating them to history but, for the most part, keeping them around for fun; canoes to sailing ships to steamers to airplanes; horses to steam locomotives to expressways; and clay tablets to paper to ... well, let's see.

If you put aside all the buzzwords and cliches, the Internet, or whatever it morphs into, is the next big move up our evolutionary ladder. It is the next improvement in the way we keep in touch, keep informed and, if we're as smart as we think we are, keep the whole game going. There is no getting around it. It is here to stay. Logging on has already become a daily ritual with millions of people around the world. The next few years could see it become more of a ritual than reading the morning newspaper.

But like all new technologies and developments, the people who are the first to adopt it are seldom the ones who successfully exploit it. The road to new things is littered with old corpses. Exploring new ways of doing things is a dangerous game. Always has been, always will be. So it stands to reason that the first people who try to publish a magazine on the Internet, and forgo the paper, will not be successful at it. Many have tried, many have died.

When I was first told by the folks at Computing Japan that they planned to take the magazine off the newsstands and put it exclusively on the Web, I was, quite honestly, a bit dismayed. I'm a creature of paper and don't deny it. It's what I'm used to; what I'm comfortable with. Yet after I gave it some thought, I realized it is the next logical step for the magazine, ANY magazine. The news business has always been about being the first with the most. Technology has just been a means to that end and that is never going to change.

The folks at CJ have now sold the house, packed up the expedition, and are heading off into the cyber-jungle, hoping to make their fortune. There will be no turning back. As with other historic journeys into new territory, only future historians will know for sure who made it and who didn't. It is all up to the readers now. They will determine whether or not the electronic form of this magazine will live happily ever after or end up as a pile of molding bones on a jungle path like so many who came before.

From next month, you will be finding this column at the CJ web site. Only the form you read it in will change. In fact, the content will almost certainly be better since the lead time from writing to publishing will be much shorter. The six weeks that was needed from the time a column was written to the time you read it will be a thing of the past.

A deep and sincere thanks to all of you who have been reading the paper version of this column in the paper version of this magazine for so many years. I've especially enjoyed the notes from readers trapped with a copy of CJ on board the many commercial airlines that carried it throughout the world. I hope to be hearing from all of you, indeed more of you, in the coming months and years. We'll need our friends. It is a jungle out there.

"Now this is the Law of the Jungle - as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, and the Wolf that shall break it must die." - Rudyard Kipling.

Thomas Caldwell is a freelance journalist based in Tokyo.
You can reach him at caldwell@gol.com

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