Predicting the number of people hooked up to the internet would seem to be a thankless task, but to analyst such as IDC it’s their meat and drink, not to mention a nice revenue generator. Right now IDC believes there were 53.2 million users up to a couple of days ago, although how it can be so sure we will never know. Of those it believes 44.2 million are web users. The rest are mainly at companies that use email but do not have web access, for whatever reason. By the year end IDC reckons the figures will be 50 million web users and 60 million for the internet as a whole. IDC finds it especially interesting, albeit somewhat patronizingly, that 23 million of the 53 million are from outside the US, which it believes must make them non-English speaking. IDC is forgetting the level of English spoken throughout the world.
