(FORTUNE Magazine) – Tour Silicon Valley and it's hard to believe there ever was a dot-com crash. You'll hear geeks boast how the web is changing the world. You'll see search engines and blogs supported by online advertising popping up like mushrooms. Telecom, cable, and even electric companies are scrambling to sell bundles of telephone, Internet, and TV service. Computer and consumer electronics makers are duking it out over who'll control home entertainment. Pundits are back to predicting how all this makes Microsoft irrelevant.

What does the resurgence mean? Just this: The Internet is becoming the epochal communication and entertainment platform that the dot-commers envisioned--it just took longer than most of them thought. But some things have changed: This year's key tech arenas will be wireless and the home, not the office, while wars, both real and virtual, are bringing security issues into sharper relief.

Beyond infotech, neuromarketing, genetic medicine, and even nuclear power will make themselves felt as trends. And who'd have dreamed that China's tech sector would evolve so quickly or that its entrepreneurs would be clamoring for intellectual-property protection? But then, it's 2005, and more and more of the world is running on Internet time. -- Fred Vogelstein