Nintendo is not losing money on the razor to sell the blades. Why not take that kind of power and build it into a more general-purpose – but stripped-down – machine, with Netscape or Mosaic built in, that everyone can afford? Congress worries about the information-rich versus the information-poor, but most of its members probably don’t realize that computers can cost less than bicycles.
A wave of Net-based telephony products have the telcos’ long-term seers shakin’ in their recently deregulated boots. You heard it here first: the voice business is dead. Repeat: it’s not even a commodity; it’s doomed. The telcos know it, too.
Technology is close enough to being out of control that human intervention has become a weaker and weaker constraint. Also, it’s important to regard technology in the long sweep of history as being one with history. In fact, it’s one with biology, one with the rise of multicellular life forms, and it’s headed someplace – probably. But it’s not alien to the sweep of development and beauty and order in the universe.
If Luddite beliefs seem a vague notion now, wait a bit. Soon they, or 21st-century mutations of them, will be household words … The real issue isn’t jobs or even the lost forests of Sherwood. It’s the unstiflable desire of human beings to create things. Some of what results makes the world astonishingly better; some is frightening to even think about. The Earth does seem to be in environmental peril, but just as many people will argue that technology can preserve and save it as argue technology will destroy it. And the notion that all the new machinery can or will be dismantled is the silliest kind of sophistry.
Because people are used to owning information, not leasing it, tangible forms of media like CD-ROM will be with us for a long time.
Books allowed complex theories to be disseminated, TV brought titillating images of sex and violence to the home, and the Net – well, the Net seems best at spreading controversy. The last few months have seen wave after wave of outrage sweep over the Net. First it was polemics about the Pentium flaw, then it was attacks on the patented GIF algorithm, now it’s debates about IP security holes. Sure, the strength of a many-to-many medium is that it allows for grass-roots organizing, but can’t it empower us to do something other than kvetch?
Digital, connected, decentralized, ubiquitous: a network of networks, controlled by no one, buzzing with competition among innovative individuals and firms of all sizes, but with plenty of room for those who simply want to talk [ – this is how both Al Gore and Newt Gingrich see the future of the Internet].
Twenty years ago, no publisher anticipated that teletype terminals would grow into a portable threat to books, that paper tapes would merge with film into multimedia CD-ROMs, or that telephones would threaten the whole business model of publishing by bringing the Web into your home. The difference in time between loony ideas and shipped products is shrinking so fast that it’s now, oh, about a week.
Noncontact coupling between your body and weak electric fields can be used to create and sense tiny nano-amp currents in your body. Modulating these signals creates Body Net, a personal-area network that communicates through your skin … Your shoe computer can talk to a wrist display and keyboard and heads-up glasses. Activating your body means that everything you touch is potentially digital. A handshake becomes an exchange of digital business cards, a friendly arm on the shoulder provides helpful data, touching a doorknob verifies your identity, and picking up a phone downloads your numbers and voice signature for faithful speech recognition.
We will see access to broadband information service becoming standard, although six years may be a little early. Embedded chips in lights and appliances is coming, but for now it’s a niche phenomenon.