When I look at the Internet, I see something astounding and delightful. It’s as if some grim fallout shelter had burst open and a full-scale Mardi Gras parade had come out. I take such enormous pleasure in this that it’s hard to remain properly skeptical.
The personal computer is evolving all the time. It’s going to take over the world … The future lies with the dealing with information in real time. Selling pre-recorded stuff – no matter how entertaining, like videos – down the line will not make a fortune for anyone.
Take that convergence of the computer and the television, a coalescing of technologies that should allow us to shunt around all those movies, spreadsheets, video shots, and “picture” telephone calls on one screen. “It’s a bit like talking about the convergence of the horseless carriage and the modern automobile,” says Grove. “The proper word is replacement. The computer is taking over the television.”
What will drive (the PC industry) forward is going to be communications.
The information superhighway could evolve into the business model for the cable television industry.
The coming decade may put a collective spin on technobabble, but this lexicon is here to stay. The only development that may eventually stanch its spread is the disappearance of computers as we know them: boxes connected to screen, keyboards, and peripherals. When and if that happens – when computers become nothing more than a component of the “integrated home entertainment center” – will much of the lingo now needed to talk about and explain them be necessary any longer?
One could argue that some aspects of technobabble hold the potential to form a universal language of technology – a sort of “High-Tech Esperanto” that might actually succeed.
Technobabble’s real victim could be the industry itself, which is in danger of sliding into the same semantic swamp in which wallow lawyers, civil servants, military officers, socialogists and politicians.
By leveraging the superhighway, many types of companies will be able to re-engineer their business to provide dramatic improvements in internal processes and a quantum leap in customer services. In the financial sector, for example, the banks will be able to work far more intimately with their customers and, for that matter, with their customers’ customers.
The position of most network vendors will be that of a “global village cobbler,” forced into building many different kinds of networks technologies to service clients needs … Vendors have a tough road ahead … “Heterogeneity is here to stay.” And it won’t just be vendors that have to cope.