Noone could convince me that multimedia has yet come to the web in any sort of meaningful way. Today, I opened a copy of Safari on Jaguar. The web page channels.netscape.com is what opened and it 'offered' to allow me to hear a new song by Jessica Simpson. I'd never heard of Jessica Simpson, so I clicked on the link...

After a few clicks I got a message saying that 'the feature' was not available for Macintosh.

Naturally, I simply got out my Dell laptop and opened Firefox with the same page. Click click click, and Firefox automatically downloaded some media player functionality and asked me to restart the browser. OK, so I did that. Once again, I opened channels.netscape.com and clicked forward to the audio page. Now I got a player window. I click play and wait.... No audio.

Finally, as a last resort, I opened IE on Windows (supposedly the standard by which web designers test their pages) and opened the same page. Once again, I get a player window, click play and nothing happens.

In 1996, when I was writing CineWeb, multimedia 'sort-of' worked on the www. Eight years later, multimedia 'sort-of' works.

No wonder the iPod is such a smashing success. I mean, it works. It just works. It is easy to see that all the pent-up frustration in the consumer's inability to use their computers for audio is just flowing in the direction of the iPod.