Hey, remember this?

Remember the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft? Well forget it. The Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance. In its place … broader and deeper new interfaces for electronic media are being born. BackWeb and PointCast, propelled by hot young Silicon Valley start-ups. Constellation and Active Desktop, spawned in the engineering labs of the browser kings. And from the content companies, prototypes powered by underlying new technologies – Castanet, ActiveX, and Java.

What they share are ways to move seamlessly between media you steer (interactive) and media that steer you (passive). They promote media that merrily slip across channels, guiding human attention as it skips from desktop screen to phonetop screen to a car windshield. These new interfaces work with existing media, such as TV, yet they also work on hyperlinked text. But most important, they work on the emerging universe of networked media that are spreading across the telecosm.

Use this moment to stop laughing hysterically. Seriously. They said this with a straight face, once upon a time. People thought this was a good idea.

I couldn’t tell you what Castanet was, nor do I care enough to spend the five seconds with Google to look it up. ActiveX has mostly become a security hole, and Java.. well, what can I say about Java that hasn’t been said elsewhere before? Java on the client side will still, in 2005, run a reasonable chance of crashing at least the VM if not the entire browser session; Java on the server side will, in 2005, kinda sorta work, assuming you make it live inside something like Oracle (where it might only crash an instance of the database manager, if you’re lucky).

I think it’s instructive that most of the really bad ideas from the 1990s — push technology, crappy VoD services, entry portals on Web pages — essentially revolved around the idea that you could get a user to allow you to lead him around by the nose. When that turned out not to be true, business models and assumptions that were thought to be manifestly correct ended up being more or less incorrect. That makes me happy, though I’m not sure I could tell you why. It’s also instructive when you realize how fully out of touch those Wired guys really once upon a time, and it makes you kinda wonder why you ever listened to them in the first place.