To understand who will become wealthy in Information Age, first we need to understand how Information Age differs from Industrial Age (born about 1860, died about 1989).

In fact, let's get a complete overview and go back to Agrarian Age.

In Agrarian Age, society was basically divided into two classes: landowners and people who worked on land (the serfs). If you were a serf, there wasn't much you could do about it: land-ownership passed down through families and you were stuck with status you were born into.

When Industrial Age arrived, everything changed: it was no longer agriculture that generated most of wealth, but manufacturing. Suddenly, land was no longer key to wealth. A factory occupied far less land than a sheep farm or a wheat farm.

With Industrial Age came a new kind of wealthy person: self-made businessman. Wealth no longer depended on land-ownership and family you were born into. Business acumen and factories were creating a new class of wealthy person. But it still required enormous capital to build a factory and start a business.

Then came World Wide Web (in about 1989) and globalization. Suddenly, everything changed again.

Factories (or real estate) were no longer necessary to run a business. Anyone with a website could start a business. The barriers to wealth that existed in Agrarian Age and Industrial Age were completely gone. People who could never have dreamed of owning their own business were making millions from their kitchen table.

Of course, Information Revolution didn't begin in 1989.

It began in 1444 when Gutenberg invented printing press in Mainz, Germany.

But printing press (newspapers, magazines, paperbacks) belonged to Industrial Age, not Information Age.

The printing press is a 'one-to-many' technology. The Internet is a 'many-to-many' technology. And that was what changed in 1989.

The Industrial Age was about centralization and control. The Information Age is about de-centralization and no control. No government and no media magnate controls Internet. This is crucial thing to understand about Information Age.

As we moved from Agrarian Age through Industrial Age to Information Age, there's been a steady collapse of barriers that kept one section of society wealthy and other section poor.

In Information Age, literally anyone can become wealthy.

It’s a different story now.

In virtual community, small guys are giving big boys a run for their money. With sheer guts and a few thousand dollars to start up, a lot of home-based entrepreneurs are making a killing day-in and day-out on Internet. All done in private confines of their little home-offices (very often called, kitchen, dining, garage, bedroom, den or whatever part of house).

In Internet, we small guys don’t have to fear big guys. We can spend sleepless nights pouring all those tutorial books on HTML programming to create site that will clobber those million-dollar creations to pieces. If they cannot stand you, they can buy you out! And I am sure that you like that, as it will make you rich!

We small guys have more flexibility with our operations. We have more control. We can do what we want. In fact, although big boys have money to squander, they are incapable of doing what we small fries can do at a click of “mouse”. For example, it will take five working days or maybe a week or more, for a big corporation to make a very simple change of a misspelled word on website. If that mistake was observed at time when person in charge of Internet was on three-month vacation leave, that error may have to stay there while whole company suffers degradation that a simple word brought about.