The container of Windows can hold just about anything, and therefore it allows users to do everything. The "interoperability and broad accessibility" of Windows is the main reason why Microsoft has attained its current market position, in Dyson's view, as well as the reason Gates deserves his place as one of the 20/20 honourees.

Of course, business and social contexts change, often as a consequence of new technologies. In fact, Dyson believes that a technology's significance can be judged by how much it changes our behaviour. E-mail is the obvious example: The technology lacked significance until it reached a critical mass of usage. A change in how people communicate made e-mail the ultimate killer app. Dyson also notes that that critical mass didn't come together all by itself. E-mail would never have spread as quickly had the operators of independent networks such as MCI and CompuServe not committed to the Internet standard of the late 1980s.

Looking forward, Dyson sees two areas where that kind of standard-setting is badly needed. One is instant messaging, which will be of limited usefulness to businesses until IM vendors are able to settle on a common protocol and security standards. The other is the domain naming system for all Internet sites, whose rationale has been the subject of dispute for years. For Dyson, standardization is one of the requirements of successful technologies. Much of the value in technology, she says, is fundamentally about standardization. "Is [a technology] capable of talking to other systems?" asks Dyson. "The level of abstraction rises and rises."

Successful standardization and increased abstraction mark the achievements of many of this year's 20/20 honourees. Dyson says of Vinton Cerf: "Putting AOL, Prodigy and the Internet all together is as much his work as anyone." And Tim Berners-Lee's lead role in development of the Web now underlies much of the ongoing activity in collaborative computing.

Even in today's market, Dyson remains an active investor in technology companies, with more than 40 currently in her portfolio. In pursuing her personal mantra of "discovering the inevitable and promoting the possible," Dyson puts money into technologies and companies that create new usefulness and value. She believes that one promising area is identity management. Dyson sees the need for technologies that will enable people to control their online identities and allow companies to verify consumers' identities.

Another promising technology is wireless. Dyson predicts that the technology will boom as telecommunications companies use it to bridge the gap between broadband gateways and users' homes and businesses — the so-called last mile. Location-based computing, which combines triangulation technologies and global positioning systems, could also be a boon to wireless. There are, in this case, social implications to be sorted out, as companies could track their consumers' whereabouts and activities. "They know where you are, and not everyone likes that," she says.

But social implications are, after all, a requirement of lasting technologies. "Technologies with staying power have social implications and business implications," Dyson says. "If they didn't, they wouldn't matter. Business is about people, about people interacting." Just ask any of this year's 20/20 honourees.