The Palace’s Joey Altman envisions an explosion of chefs on-line two or three years from now. They’ll offer real-time cooking shows or a selection of video demonstrations that may be downloaded for a fee. You’ll see the familiar slew of celebrity chefs … “The special hook is the interactivity … it’s going to enhance that feeling of wanting to go to that restaurant. It’s going to be like living out a fantasy, as sick as that sounds.”
Despite all its flaws and faults … there will be a complete dominance of this technology. I have no doubt that this is the technology of our generation and it will subsume much of the world economy.
There’s a great Bill Gibson line: “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” There’s tension from people who are on the (cyberspace) border. I’m afraid it will result in violence before it’s all over. I want to see us thinking openly and seriously about how to avoid bloodshed. Because blood will be shed over this divide before it’s over with. It’s really just a question of how much.
We need to understand that all this stuff about cyberspace is part of an even larger explosion on the planet, which is the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial or Third Wave world. That involves a lot of issues. It involves issues of power. It involves issues of conflict. It involves issues of what’s happening in other countries, involves issues of dislocations and how do we deal with that.
A mass movement for cyberspace is still hard to see. Unlike the masses during the industrial age, this rising Third Wave constituency is highly diverse. Like the economic sectors it serves, it is demassified – composed of individuals who prize their differences. This very heterogeneity contributes to its lack of political awareness. It is far harder to unify than the masses of the past. Yet there are key themes on which this constituency-to-come can agree. To start with, liberation from the Second Wave rules, regulations, taxes and laws laid in place to serve the smokestack barons and bureaucrats of the past. Next, of course, must come the creation of a new civilization, founded in eternal truths of the American Idea. It is time to embrace these challenges, to grasp the future and pull ourselves forward.
We’re going to have to come up with different policy models. The biggest long-range problem is how the Internet will be managed. Before, it was sort of an insiders’ club and there was no formal structure. The effort now is to try to promote the Internet Society [a nonprofit organization formed this January] as an overall umbrella to include the IAB as well as the IETF and the IRTF, both chartered by the IAB. By incorporating ourselves in the Internet Society, we want to formulate our independence.
Everyone seems to be embracing a collapsed backbone technology today. However, the interesting question is how much internetworking will be done on the floor and how much will be done in the basement. The internetworking that goes on the floor must absolutely be plug-and-play, while the more complex functions will be collapsed into the basement.
I love the Internet. It’s going to thrive, and I’m going to be a part of it. It’s that in order for it to thrive, we must confront tough questions. It’s not easy to admit that most of what’s on the Internet is irrelevant to what I’m interested in. In some way, the computer is a wonderful ostrich hole into which we can stick our heads and our minds but still the world goes on.
I do not perceive an upcoming fountain of commerce over the World Wide Web for a number of reasons. The Internet and computer interactions will not replace classical commercial interactions because the Internet and the World Wide Web are missing an important ingredient salespeople. We techies think, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world without the salesdroids, blah, aren’t they horrible.” However, when somebody needs to buy something, whether it’s 5,000 CD-ROM drives or a Toyota Camry, one expects to be able to talk to and speak with a salesperson who will be there live in front of you, for reasons of trust, commitment, a sense of having a person to help grease the gears of commerce. I don’t think the World Wide Web will ever replace that person.
Data warehousing will continue to be very hot because it’s extremely beneficial to companies. Multimedia will be important because it enables a wide range of applications in the area of training and education, as well as commercial retailing applications designed to run on kiosks. And the Web will definitely change the nature of applications. The products that we’ll be coming out with will be very different from what is available today. Most Internet products came out of academia or had basic capabilities that appealed to lots of users. The next generation of products will be integrated with corporate data and drive computing back to the servers. We’ll see more componentware coming off the net as opposed to software-heavy clients that create lots of management issues.