At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google (GOOG) era of irrelevant search results.

At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You’ve got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don’t always figure out exactly what you’re looking for, they’re practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet.

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“There is nothing ‘oh my god’ unique that has happened on the Net in forever. What we have seen are incremental applications that have been powered by the amazing ongoing drop in pricing of PCs, hard drives, memory and BACKBONE (not last mile) bandwidth. None of which are ‘the Internet.’ … It’s not the Net, it’s the applications, stupid! Falling costs to create, host and deliver digital bits enable entrepreneurs to be entrepreneurial. … It’s the brainpower that is changing our world. The Internet is just a utility to deliver the digital bits they create.”
–Mark Cuban

In July 2006, Mark Cuban, the billionaire Internet entrepreneur who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock back in 1999, declared the Internet “old news and boring.” And now, a little over a year later, he’s gone and pronounced it dead. Speaking at a cable telecommunications industry event earlier this week Cuban, who seems to have regained his wind after a recent and much publicized colonoscopy, said the Internet has become a dull bunch of infrastructure. “The Internet’s dead,” Cuban said. “It’s over. … The Internet’s for old people.”

Huh. So if the Internet’s for old people, where should the world’s next Mark Cuban focus his/her attentions? On the “intranet,” which Cuban describes as the on-demand and digital video-recording platforms managed by cable companies. “There’s less restriction on the intranet, it’s like your own corporate network for all the cable networks and even wireless,” Cuban told Advertising Age. “All [content] is moving to the TV. What’s the difference between a PC and a TV? Nothing.”