Someone asked me today what I thought the most surprising thing about the internet today was. I was stumped, and the question has been rolling around in my head for hours.

Sure, it’s surprising that projects with poor performance, atrocious user-interface and horrific security records (programs, websites, even operating systems) consistently command more users than vastly superior competitors. But that’s more an unfortunate truth about market inertia.

I couldn’t come up with something surprising about the internet, because nothing has really surprised me for years. I know that sounds terrifically arrogant. Bear with me for a moment. The real surprising thing about the internet today is how slow things are moving. Movies on demand on my computer? Buying a single digital audio track for $1? I talked about that with friends back in ’98 (just not the DRM part). Social networking? Blogging? Can you say sixdegrees and slashdot? Geeks have been doing this stuff for years. An easy to use phone / PDA / music player? It’s about time. Geotagging? Posting photos online? Pervasive wi-fi? Video on webpages? It’s not just me… ask anyone in “the industry” and they’ll roll their eyes and say “Yeah, glad to see someone is finally doing that.”

When I was in junior high, I made a cardboard model of “the home entertainment center of the future” for the school science fair. It was a TV, a VCR, a radio, a phone, answering machine, fax, modem, computer for word processing, and a video game system, all in one. Now I have one, under my desk — the computer part has taken over the functions of everything else. The surprising thing is that it took more than fifteen years.

And the most surprising thing about the internet today is that all these hot new applications took so long to appear.

The question you should be asking is, “ok, what’s the next step, smarty pants?” There are lots. I’m working on one right now, and when I’m done with that I’ll pick one of the eight or so obvious next steps and start again.