Chapter 8: Friction-Free Capitalism

The information highway will extend the electronic marketplace and make it the ultimate go-between, the universal middleman … All the goods for sale in the world will be available for you to examine, compare, and, often, customize. When you want to buy something you’ll be able to tell your computer to find it for you at the best price offered by any acceptable source or ask your computer to “haggle” with the computers of various sellers … This will carry us into a new world of low-friction, low-overhead capitalism, in which market information will be plentiful and transaction costs low. It will be a shopper’s heaven.

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

Your phone or computer will be able to generate a lifelike digital image of your face, showing you listening or even talking. You really will be talking – it’s just that you’ve taken the call at home and are dripping wet from the shower. As you talk, your phone will synthesize an image of you in your most businesslike suit. Your facial expressions will match your words (remember, small computers are going to get very powerful). Just as easily, your phone will be able to transmit an image of your words issuing from the mouth of someone else, or from an idealized version of you. If you are talking to someone you’ve never met, and you don’t want to show a mole or a flabby chin, your caller won’t be able to tell if you really look so much like Cary Grant (or Meg Ryan) or whether you’re getting a little help from your computer.

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

Within a few years there will be hybrid communications systems that combine elements of synchronous and asynchronous communications. These systems will use DSVD (and later ISDN) telephone communications to permit the simultaneous transfer of voice and data, even before the full information highway is in place. It will work this way: When companies post information about their products on the Internet, part of that information will include instructions for how a customer can connect synchronously with a sales representative who will be able to answer questions through a voice-data connection.

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

Businesses worldwide will be transformed. Software will become friendlier, and companies will base the nervous systems of their organizations on networks that reach every employee and beyond, into the world of suppliers, consultants, and customers. The result will be companies that are more effective and, often, smaller. In the longer run, as the information highway makes physical proximity to urban services less important, businesses will decentralize and disperse their activities, and cities, like companies, may be downsized.

Chapter 6: The Content Revolution

The exponential expansion of computing power will keep changing the rules and opening new possibilities that will seem as remote and farfetched then as some of the things I’ve speculated on here might seem today. Talent and creativity have always shaped advances in unpredictable ways … The information highway will open undreamed-of artistic and scientific opportunities to a new generation of geniuses.

Chapter 5: Paths to the Highway

The major benefit of the PC revolution has been the way it has empowered people. The highway’s low-cost communications will empower in an even more fundamental way. The beneficiaries won’t just be technology-oriented individuals. As more and more computers are connected to high-bandwidth networks, and as software platforms provide a foundation for great applications, everyone will have access to most of the world’s information.