No matter who you talk to today, a majority of people will have at least heard of the Internet phenomenon. Technology that was once confined within the walls of academia has come kicking and screaming into the world of twentieth century commerce. Even more astonishing has been the rate at which many forward-thinking visionaries in the business community have embraced and exploited this technology. The adoption of Internet and associated World Wide Web technologies by the business community has been greatly influenced by the direction and strategies emanating from every key software vendor in the industry. Indeed, it is difficult to find any vendor today who has not Internet-enabled or Web-enabled any products.
OK, before we tackle the business benefits, let’s go over the jargon and technology components that make up the Internet and the World Wide Web. If you’ve heard it all before, you can move on to the “Compelling Business Reasons in the Internet Revolution” section on page 164.
First question, then—just what is the Internet? The Internet is the largest network in the world. It provides a means by which computers all over the globe can communicate between networks on different platforms and in different environments and allows users throughout the world to access and share information. Originally developed by the U.S. government as a way of linking geographically separate Department of Defense computers, it has grown phenomenally over the last few years, from a tiny 300 connected networks in 1988 to over 100,000 today.
The structure of the Internet is such that no particular company or government “owns” it. It has been cultivated by the cooperation of connecting networks and the collaborative development and adoption of standards. Today the growth and the structure of the Internet are regulated by a cooperative body called the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The standards that define the technical details of the Internet are recorded in publicly available specification documents known as Requests For Comment (RFCs).
One of the strengths of the Internet as a tool for communication is that it was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. (It’s harder to imagine a more rigorous design criterion.) The Internet has no central backbone—it stretches around the globe in spiderweb fashion. When you connect from one computer to another via the Internet, the path that is used to connect you (the links from one computer to another) is not fixed but is dynamically determined as you transfer data. Thus, the data being transferred between two computers can take many different routes.