We’re trying internally to cut down on the amount of paper that we use … With the hypertext kind of paradigm that you see on the Web, you can imagine putting all of your corporate documentation on there – even things like design files for machines.
Predictor: Joy, Bill
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 Information Week article regarding the future of the Internet, Bill Joy addresses problems associated with corporate documentation and explains how browsers could help organize and ease problems associated with complicated documenting precesses that corporations already use: ”We’re trying internally to cut down on the amount of paper that we use at Sun. With the hypertext kind of paradigm that you see on the Web, you can imagine putting all of your corporate documentation on there – even things like design files for machines. For example, I now have a lateral file cabinet full of those manuals that came with all the machines they set up, and it’s indexed by part numbers. It sure would be nice if there was just one browser where all of that stuff could get hyperlinked together on the Web. We’ve made a corporate commitment to work on that, and it’s already making a big difference. Right now, we have several viewers. We have our employee manuals online in one viewer, the stock plan administration’s in another, health care in another, and expense reporting in another. They’re all in different databases, so you can’t easily make a link. Say you have an expense report, and you have some exceptional thing and you want to point to the place in the employee manual where it authorizes that. That’s a problem today, in general, because there are no authoring tools in these Web browsers. But you can imagine that making up an expense report can be like authoring a page. We think it’s really going to make a big difference in corporations. People in companies spend a lot of time in engineering and management just looking for things, and that would really help solve that problem alone.”
Biography:Bill Joy served as chief of technical strategy at Sun Microsystems, a position he held in the 1990s, from the founding of days of the company in 1982. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Date of prediction: July 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Information Week
Title, headline, chapter name: The Internet – Where’s It All Going?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=b83c10508e19ffbee2b32765ce099c64&_docnum=13&wchp=dGLbVlz-lSlAl&_md5=c019c9e4607b692c5d94a18a96d58bde
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Bruno, Marian Theresa