“Let the plumbers build the pipes, and we will use them” – Sorry, but thatÕs not good enough. That retreating battle cry has only sustained a gigantic bandwidth, protocol, and network management quagmire. It will get worse, too. Think about all the video, audio, and other data that you will soon need to send across a WAN … Add to that the ongoing efforts to push more and more data out to branch offices to empower those staffs. Soon you can imagine the tremendous demands that business – your business – could place on the data highway. None of us has all the answers, but collectively we can offer some pretty sound advice on what a data highway ought to be.
Predictor: Allen, Dennis
Prediction, in context:In a 1993 editorial for Byte magazine, editor Dennis Allen writes: ”Please donÕt think that it doesnÕt matter how the data highway gets built. At the Anderson School of Management at UCLA this fall I spoke with a group of information managers from a variety of large companies. When I suggested their involvement in shaping the data highway, one gentleman rang out with the age-old axiom (my apologies for mixing metaphors), ‘Let the plumbers build the pipes, and we will use them.’ Sorry, but thatÕs not good enough. That retreating battle cry has only sustained a gigantic bandwidth, protocol, and network management quagmire. It will get worse, too. Think about all the video, audio, and other data that you will soon need to send across a WAN (Wide-Area Network). Data is just data, of course, but think about how much of it you and your company will need to route in the coming years. Add to that the ongoing efforts to push more and more data out to branch offices to empower those staffs. Soon you can imagine the tremendous demands that business – your business – could place on the data highway. None of us has all the answers, but collectively we can offer some pretty sound advice on what a data highway ought to be.”
Date of prediction: December 1, 1993
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Byte
Title, headline, chapter name: Building a Data Highway
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Page 14
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Garrison, Betty