It is axiomatic that the impact of technology is usually overstated in the near-term and underestimated in the long term. Technology pundits focus on the micro implications of a new development, which they often guess wrong at, without consideration for the broader, macro effects.

While it's hard to imagine that the impact of the Internet could ever outdistance the hyperbole that has accompanied its rise, there have been a few clear signs recently that the micro changes, like ordering books and CDs online, will be insignificant in the face of broader, systemic changes, especially to the business world.

Indeed, the first few dominoes have already fallen in an unstoppable chain reaction that will fundamentally change the way we electronically entertain ourselves in the home, but most entertainment companies still don't recognize the full extent of what they are facing.

The music industry, for example, is playing with a double-edged sword. The Web makes possible its dream of charging consumers every time they listen to a song, but the MP3 compression standard threatens to create music piracy on an unprecedented scale and necessitates a massive rethink of the industry's distribution strategy.

The record companies seem to think they have years to address this issue before they see a serious erosion of revenues. They'll be lucky if they have months. The guy who used to make a bootleg tape of his favourite band's new CD and mail it to a friend or two can now simply load it onto his hard drive and, at not cost to himself, email it to everyone in his address book, or everyone in all the Usenet groups he subscribes to.

A year from now, North American music sales could be down 10 per cent, and they will fall thereafter at a rate that is exponential to the sales of MP3 players. The genie is out of the bottle.

Think it can't happen? Ask the three major U.S. television networks if new models can't quickly erode their market share to devastating effect. The implications for record company promotions and the global system of building international recording stars are worth considering.

Speaking of the television industry, it is example number two. The advent of software-only DVD players for personal computers, and personal VCRs, able to store hundreds of hours of programming on a hard disk, and play them back on your TV screen, without commercials, will certainly change the current economic advertising model. You'll still have audiences, of course, though they'll be more fragmented and clustered. But the opportunities for the kind of mass marketing campaigns that have defined the industrialized world for the last 50 years will steadily diminish.

Even the video game industry, arguably one of the first children of the digital age, will find that its marketing and distribution strategies, are increasingly irrelevant. Software that simulates on your PC any kind of game machine now circulates freely on the Web. The most sophisticated, enthusiastic consumers of Web-based technology are often, not coincidentally, video game players. With television sets poised to become high-bandwidth Web devices, the video game industry is also going to have to rethink its revenue model.

When the Web first started to grab hold of the average consumer's imagination, some of these major upheavals were predicted, in a non-specific sort of way, with a lot of attention paid to categories such as on-line retail, travel, software and the creation of communities of interest.

Some of these changes have emerged, to varying degrees, with very little impact on our day-to-day lives.

Over the next year, we're going to start to see broader changes that redefine many of our institutions, including industries such as finance, entertainment and health care. The long-view is now approaching the ends of our noses.