The old joke about technology is that anything you predict will happen in a year will turn out to be too optimistic, but anything you predict will happen in ten years will turn out to be not optimistic enough. For all the hype in the late 90s about the power of the internet, it seemed like much of that promise got washed away over the last three years. Now, however, some are starting to notice that things that were promised to happen in 1999-2000 have actually started to come true. So, it might not be that people were completely making up what was going to happen, they just were a little too optimistic on the timeline.