The Net, MP3 and now it appears - IM - are finding rich, deep resonance inside the souls of college students. Just like beer bashs, fraternity pledges and political rallys before it - using computers to do research, communicate and express themselves is as much a part of college life as dating and sports.
The best part of all this, is not only the fact that these college students grow up to become the next generation dot commers and yuppies, but it also helps foster new technology and greatly increases the 'installed base' of savvy techo-cyber consumers. College students nowadays apparently spend as much time in front of their PCs, and spend their money on-line, as they do hanging out at bars or parties. Colleges appear to be a full time technology trraining grounds, pouring more and more technology user's into the marketplace - at the pace of over a few million - a year.
This is major major. It continues the trends started in the late 80's - early ninties of disseminating technology into student's lives and it helps give traction to all sorts of cool new technology trends, such as IM, blogging and web services. Having millions of college students use ANY new technology also helps give birth to all sorts of new companies and entities - which are founded and staffed by former college students, who not too long ago, were also living in dorm rooms and eating in cafeterias.
These are the people who will utilize the new tools we're developing and who will try out new products and trends, where other - more entrenched computer users - might shy away from. You don't have to convince college students to try out something new and cool, like integrated tool environments. The trick will be to get them to pay for it :-)
