Interactive digital video technology will change how business people communicate electronically. Just think about the existing difficulties of imparting to a globally dispersed team the full implications of a new product. In the future, all participants will get access to programmable scenarios about the product launch.
A new kind of computerized communications will … eclipse the telephone. It will tie our computers at home and work to the outside world, enabling us to plunder the world’s entertainment and information resources at the push of a button.
There is a broad consensus in government and industry that the National Information Infrastructure, as the Clinton Administration prefers to call the info highway, will be a broadband, switched network that could, in theory, deliver all … things. But how it will be structured and how it will be deployed are not so clear.
I think the best paradigm for the Internet is to forget that its a technology and pretend that it’s a language … [The] Internet behaves more like the English language than like a technology … I can scarcely believe what I’m seeing nowadays. There’s something primally exhilarating about being in a bus without brakes.
The Internet culture has its roots so deep, I don’t think it’s going to disappear.
[The Internet culture of the early ’90s is] a perfect Marxist state, where almost nobody does any business. But at some point that will have to change.
The system could evolve in one of two ways: Either entrepreneurs will manage to set up shop on a free-market version of the Internet, or some consortium will take the whole thing over and turn it into a giant CompuServe. “That’s an outcome,” O’Reilly says, “that would effectively destroy the Internet as we know it.”
I feel kind of sad about it. [The early Internet, before commercialization] was such a dynamic, pulsing thing. I wonder whether we shouldn’t have left it alone.
The chief beneficiaries of all this invention … will be the people of the world, ascending to new pinnacles of prosperity in an Information Age … Communications bandwidth is not only the secret of electronic progress. It is also the heart of economic growth, stretching the webs of interconnection that extend the reach of markets and the realms of opportunity … The advance of the telecosm offers unprecedented hope to the masses of people whom the industrial revolution passed by.
A revolution in communications – the ability to find people with common interests, and share common tools and common interfaces … will drive PC usage to a new level, particularly in the home.