The Internet is dead! Long live the Internet!

Perhaps it was the dot-com crash. Perhaps it was big business` acceptance of the technology. Maybe it has just outlived its novelty. The Internet is no longer the same beast that it once was. It has undergone a fundamental shift.

[VIDEO]I say this because of the desertion of the medium - once seen as a new and exciting toy - by the engineers and programmers who founded it. Well, maybe not desertion. You can never escape a global phenomenon. And there is nothing more exciting or challenging for them to go to, yet. But judging from technical newsgroups and Web sites, the intent to move is there.

The Internet provided the propeller-heads with something to call their own - something they could stake a claim to, something they could be proud of. They were not particularly interested in monetary gains, or job titles. They were interested in creating a new world.

The well-groomed marketing people, who now own the Web, are forging paths as new as those flogged out by the geek of yesteryear.

Jason Norwood-Young, Technology Editor, ITWeb

I know that when I entered the Internet, it was totally uncharted ground. With vi, Perl, and a little imagination, we could create any universe our hearts desired. And I got to the game late, after the original pioneers had cracked the earth with even more rudimentary tools. They didn`t have degrees in Web design or distributed application development - Web design didn`t exist, and hugely scalable distributed applications had never been done before at this level. Inventing all of this techie stuff was, for us geeks, pure bliss. After years of being marginalised, the geeks had their day.

And now this is all being taken away from them. Marketing people - easily recognisable because of their good hair and fast sports cars - and the bosses who hold their leashes (the ones who used to have good hair, when they had hair), have smelt the money, and carefully and gently removed the Net from the grubby paws of the geeks, commercialising it, commoditising it, and turning it into property.

This is not a bad thing, unless you are a geek who invented the Internet and still thinks of it as his own. Many geeks, while not looking for fame or fortune as they invented the new world, found themselves lumped with it. This gives hope to all those struggling geeks out there still hacking away on freeware and shareware. They too may one day make it big. More than money, they will appreciate the recognition for their efforts.

The ones still hanging on must accept that the Internet is not what it once was. There is cross-selling and up-selling; extranets and intranets; fights over domain names and TLDs and standards; B2B, B2C, B2E and B2G.

The well-groomed marketing people, who now own the Web, are forging paths as new as those flogged out by the geek of yesteryear. They should be admired for what they do since it is in their nature, and they are merely following their own paths as surely as a geek follows his.

So where does this leave the geek? Most are still clinging to the Internet, performing the marketing people`s bidding, and making all of those great B2B and B2C applications. There are others, however, looking for the next unknown phenomenon - an entertaining problem similar to that which the Internet presented.

Finding a significant challenge is difficult, since it takes quite a feat to beat connecting almost every PC, server, mainframe, palmtop, cellphone and toaster in the world to one another, while distributing a vast amount of man`s combined knowledge to everyone, changing business forever, and affecting people`s everyday lives and the way they view and interact with the world.

It`s too bad that electron microscopes and atomic manipulators are so expensive, or I would be setting up my nanotechnology lab at home. Any geeks out there working on something global and dramatic, please let me know, so that I can follow.