(FORTUNE Magazine) – After Marc Andreessen and his University of Illinois cohorts invented Mosaic, the browser that first opened up the Web to millions of people, he co-founded Netscape, the company that helped launch the Internet revolution. Now he's chairman of Loudcloud, a company that manages software applications remotely for Web businesses. He was interviewed by FORTUNE editors Rick Tetzeli and David Kirkpatrick.

The concept of being always on, always connected, is a very powerful one. On the business side, it's really on-demand access to anything about your business that you need at any point in time. On the consumer side, it's going to have a big impact on how people interact with companies. Companies are going to need to reach consumers across all the different transmission media and devices they're going to be using--across wireless, on cell phones, into cars, onto airplanes, into cabs, into the home and TV set. Over time, it will lead to a radically different way of doing advertising and marketing. Because it's not really just the message per se--now you've got a connection, what do you do with that?

Look at the last five years, at all the changes we've had: 200 million-plus new people on the Net. It's now a permanent part of the landscape--200 million consumers who understand the Internet and how to use it. Their expectations have been shaped by it.

Will the infrastructure be out there in order to reach them? Over two to three years, it's iffy. There are still significant limitations on wireless. But certainly, in three to five years, you start to have a reasonable prospect of broadband data networks in the U.S. And it's the same thing for broad-base penetration of cable modems and DSL.

People will want wireless data for sure on their cell phones. The question becomes, Which keyboard do you want to use? There is no such thing as convergence; it's all divergence. In two years, five years, we'll still be carrying around lots of devices. I look at the kitchen, and the fact that after the last 50 years of development of kitchen appliances, I now have a separate bagel maker, a separate toaster, a separate microwave oven, a separate dishwasher, a separate trash compactor--you would think that those would have all been combined into one device by now.

I've got cell phone service and Onstar service and a GPS device in my car. I've got my ReplayTV service and my VHS, VCR, and DVD player in the house. And I'm going to have my MP3 player on my stereo and an MP3 player in my car, and I'm going to have satellite data access in my car. So it's more and more variations all the time. I think there are opportunities for convergence. But by and large, the question revolves around how the devices fit into our lives more than they revolve around an engineering standpoint.

My personal view is that video on the PC never, ever happens, because who wants to sit at a desk to look at a video? Video on the PC is, for the home, almost a complete waste of time. Broadband-data, network-based video onto the TV starts getting interesting. You'll plug the cable modem or the DSL line or your home Ethernet line into the back of a personal video recorder and download onto one of those and play back from there. In five years, those devices will have on the order of four or five hundred hours of storage; in ten years, it will be four or five thousand hours. In five years, the model of programming for an 8 o'clock time slot will be under fire.