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Quickly: The Web will fade. It will be replaced by a new software paradigm.

Content: We're in a strange place at the moment. The sweet stench of Dot Com carcasses wafts through the equity and venture markets. Much of the breathless eCommerce hype gassing out of Forbes, Business Week, Wall Street analysts, CNBC, and other advertising-/fee-funded sources has abated.

Is it over? Was the Internet a fad?

No. But we are entering a new era. We have just gone through the calisthenics of the Internet economy: There was lots of huffing and puffing, but the match hasn't started yet.

Many people think the Internet and the Web are the same thing. They're not. The Internet is a piece of wire that goes from me to you and from me to 300 million other people in the world. The Web is software that I put on my end of the wire, and you put on your end -- allowing us to exchange information.

While the Internet (the wire) evolves gradually, the software on the wire can change quickly. Before the Web, other software was clamped onto the Internet. WAIS, Gopher, and Usenet were the dominant systems, and there were companies that were doing commerce using those software models. Then along came Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen (the inventors of the Web), and suddenly all of the old systems were pushed into the background.

Most civilians think that the Web will define the landscape for a long time. A media executive I met with recently expressed this thinking: "Oh, I get it. It's 1952 and the Web is like TV. The game is going to play out for 20 to 30 years, and there will be an ABC of the Web, and a CBS, and a BBC, and an NBC, etc."

Wrong. Another software technology will come along and kill off the Web, just as it killed News, Gopher, et al. And that judgment day will arrive very soon -- in the next two to three years, not 25 years from now.

What will replace it?

While Web communications are conducted via the exchange of pages, the new software model will use executables (programs). What's the difference? Think of pages versus executables as the difference between reading a book and talking to a friend. Yes, all of those pages in the book are interesting and instructive. But you can't converse with a book the way you can with a friend. You can't cooperate with a book to perform a task. A book won't answer an unexpected question. The Web is like reading a book. An executable-powered Internet is like a two-way conversation.

When you go to a site in the future, the server will send you a program that will load onto your PC (or Palm, or cell phone). Now you've got brains at both ends of the wire, resulting in a high-IQ, interactive, valuable conversation. Work is performed at both places, greatly increasing the richness of experience, the relevancy of content, and the amount that can get done.

I call this the "executable Internet," or X Internet, for short. X Internet offers several important advantages over the Web: 1) It rides Moore's Law -- the wide availability of cheap, powerful, low real-estate processing; 2) it leverages ever dear bandwidth -- once the connection is made, a small number of bits will be exchanged, unlike the Web where lots of pages are shuttled out to the client; and 3) X Internet will be far more peer-to-peer -- unlike the server-centric Web.

This scenario could be marred by two threats: viruses and lack of standards. Once executables start to move fluidly through the Net, viruses will have perfect conditions to propagate. Standards, or rather the lack thereof, will block the quick arrival of X Internet. I can't see Microsoft, Sun, IBM, or other traditionalists setting the standards. The Web-killer's design will emerge from pure research, academe, or open source -- as did the Web.

What It Means -- No. 1: Web-centric companies get stuck holding the bag. They will wake up one day with hundreds of millions of dollars of legacy code on their hands. Yes, their brands will remain intact, but their technology will suddenly be very outmoded. Yahoo!, eBay, and AOL will find themselves competing with a new wave of commerce players that market, deliver, and service using the superior technology of X Internet. One of the upstarts will Amazon Amazon.

What It Means -- No. 2: Investors get happy. The new wave of startups will race to market with X Internet, blasting old Web infrastructure and commerce companies out of their path. Internet creative destruction, round two.

What It Means -- No. 3: Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking rockets. The X Internet's "smarts everywhere" design will enable an epidemic of Napstering. Courts, legislators, governments, companies, and other rule makers will have to contend with an empowered and ever more liberated, unruly populace -- armed with technology that allows them to bypass economic toll roads and bridges.

What It Means -- No. 4: If you are a Global 2,500 company, get ready for another round of change. This means: 1) overhauling the skills of your technologists; 2) destroying perfectly good Web sites in favor of the X Internet; 3) dumping Web-centric suppliers; and 4) retooling organizations. Change management will get a new test.

George