Digital electronics makes everything much cheaper very quickly. No other fundamental economic force has this capability. The physics of semi-conductors ensures that rapid, exponential price/performance improvements for everything digital is inevitable. Any industry that gets on the curve is locked into these digital economics. And any industry that fights the Microcosm will lose. Computers are on the curve. Telecommunications is not yet. We need cheap, fast, digital end-to-end networking. Now.
Predictor: Stahlman, Mark
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article he wrote for Network Computing magazine, Mark Stahlman, president of New Media Associates, says: ”Information Superhighway? National Information Infrastructure? New era of competition? Who do they really think they are kidding? After watching the seven hours of the Superhighway Summit broadcast on C-SPAN, I am flabbergasted. Not only don’t the heads of these great corporations have any idea what they are talking about, they don’t even know what they don’t know. Why should anyone get excited about ‘digital everything’? As George Gilder might have put it, ‘It’s the law of the Microcosm, stupid.’ Pick your law. Moore’s Law, Joy’s Law, Gilder’s Law, they all say the same thing: Digital electronics makes everything much cheaper very quickly. No other fundamental economic force has this capability. The physics of semi-conductors ensures that rapid, exponential price/performance improvements for everything digital is inevitable. Any industry that gets on the curve is locked into these digital economics. And any industry that fights the Microcosm will lose. Computers are on the curve. Telecommunications is not yet. We need cheap, fast, digital end-to-end networking. Now. Was this point even acknowledged at the summit? Forget it.”
Biography:Mark Stahlman was the president of the New York-based research and financial services firm New Media Associates in the 1990s. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Date of prediction: March 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Cost/Pricing
Name of publication: Network Computing
Title, headline, chapter name: Who’s Kidding Whom?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=b00021d8b11154f9eeed042594dcd37c...
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Taylor, Kellen L.