The 2X (two way) Internet

John Robb is the President and founder of Gómez, a leading Internet research and tools company, where he manages its business and technology initiatives. Prior to Gomez, John served as the senior Internet technology analyst for Forrester Research, flew for seven years as a pilot in Air Force Special Operations, got an MPPM from Yale University and a BS in Astronautical Engineering from the United States Air Force Academy.

The Internet is undergoing a transformation to a new system that scales better, costs less, and provides better end-user performance than the Web. Gomez calls this new system the 2X (two-way) Internet. We believe the arrival of the 2X Internet is as momentous an occasion as the arrival of the Web and is what’s necessary to achieve global customer adoption of the Internet as a means of doing business. Here are characteristics of the 2X Internet. It’s:

Local. The 2X Internet relies on the ability of desktop PCs to do much of the work necessary to actually assemble and serve a complex Web site. Contrast this to how the Web squanders PC power by only retrieving and rendering pages that are pre-masticated by large corporate servers.

Global. Rather than interconnect with singular large corporate sites, the 2X Internet will rely on customers to connect to a global network of servers that run highly distributed applications. In this model, all interactions are made with local servers that are part of a global network. No more will customers be forced to interact with services that are time zones away.

Metered. All interactions on the 2X Internet will be metered, analyzed, and charged to customers. Due to the infrastructure needed and the complexity of the interactions, business models based on free interactions will be cast aside in favor of a fee for service model.

How the 2X Internet will fix the Web

The 2X Internet has the power to transform the mediocre experience of the Web into a vibrant, rich, experience that drives customer adoption of the Internet as the preferred way of doing business. Here’s what went wrong with the Web and what the 2X Internet will do to correct it:

It’s slow. Customer productivity drops dramatically when response times are longer than a second. Times are 7-10 seconds on the Web and structural issues will prevent all improvement. The 2X Internet speeds the customer’s response times by using a server located on the customer’s PC to connect to XML-enabled data services provided by local servers in the 2X Internet global “cloud.” The short distances traveled and the power of dedicated local resources will radically improve customer productivity by making interactivity sub second!

It’s expensive. Monster clusters of servers and oversized switches costing tens of millions $$ (with huge staffs to match) run most corporate Web efforts. By distributing applications and data across a global network of small, inexpensive servers and allowing the customer’s own desktop PC to share in the burden of computation, costs drop radically.

It can’t scale. Web sites scale horribly when faced with hundreds of thousands of users doing complex tasks. By dividing the task of enabling the transaction over a global network of servers and the PC resources of millions of customers, the 2X Internet solves the scalability problem.

The Rise of the 2X Internet

Over the next three years, the infrastructure of the 2X Web will explode onto the Internet, accompanied by rapidly expanding bandwidth (particularly in the all optical core) and plummeting storage costs. It will serve as the basis for the next great technology companies that will push aside the aging PC world players and will breathe life into the moribund, financially strapped, online content world. Here is a taxonomy of the 2X Internet:

Global backbones that provide XML dial tone, desktop servlets, and highly distributed applications will emerge and begin to fill the roll to customers what the telcos did in the pre-Internet world. These backbone providers will not arise out of the Telco or hosting world but rather will be new names, such as Neoplat (my new company).

New innovative software from companies such as Centrata, KnowNow, and Applied MetaComputing will enable independent software vendors to rapidly develop, globally deploy, and easily manage their software. Microsoft will play a very large part of this revolution too with its .Net infrastructure, but it will likely be late to the party and a ferocious competitor when it arrives.

Applications engineered for the 2X Internet will quickly dominate. Web enabled apps and will be quickly outgunned in all the major areas of evaluation: functionality, ease of use, cost, and performance by the 2X Internet apps. Names such as Groove, Userland, and Rotor may become commonplace in the delivery of these services.