Faster , more powerful and cheaper: Hardware, networks, and software will become f aster , more powerful and cheaper in the next couple of years. This prediction can basically be found by extrapolation . For instance, hardware is providing more and more power at decreasing prices. This observation was pressed by Gordon Moore of Intel who showed that the cost-effectiveness of microchip technology doubles every 18 months. Within our prediction scope of five to ten years, Moore’ s la w will continue to hold, although development will slow down to some extent [Kan97 ]. Based on this extrapolation, microprocessors as powerful as a Cray-2 are expected around the year 2005. Netw orks as well as softw are sho w similar progress: Currently , the a v ailable bandwidth quadru- ples approximately e v ery 1.5 years [M ̈ ul98 ]. Ho we v er , softw are impro v ements are rather dif ficult to quantify . But re gardless the kind of softw are you consider , you can notice an enormous progress in the last decades. F or instance, consider the history of databases, starting out with hierarchical and netw ork-based databases and ending up with relational and object-oriented databases. Or the de v elopment of of fice softw are b undles, be ginning with simple te xt editors and ending up with v ery comple x multi-user editors for te xt, presentations, databases, calculations, and so on