The Internet Is Much More Than An Information Highway
The ultimate acceptance of … killer apps hinges on low cost, reliable delivery of interactive multimedia.
The ultimate acceptance of … killer apps hinges on low cost, reliable delivery of interactive multimedia.
In a marketplace expected to grow at 200 percent through the rest of the century, we expect consolidation to be some ways off … What is important is good prices, good customer service, and good GUI.
In a marketplace expected to grow at 200 percent through the rest of the century, we expect consolidation to be some ways off … What is important is good prices, good customer service, and good GUI.
People watch television, they talk on the phone, they work on their computers. The tools and toys they have for each of these tasks work just fine, so why would they change?
The digital convergence is a crock. An interesting crock, a press-release-making and share-price-hiking crock, a great source material for hooked-in politicians crock, a cocktail discussion hipness-major-bonus-points crock, but a crock nonetheless. The need for a “digital convergence” can be buried with a hundred different shovels.
It is likely that most hypertexts in the medium-term future will remain as isolated islands of information without a high degree of connectedness to other documents. This has been called the docuislands scenario.
Toward the turn of the century we should expect to see widespread publishing of hypertext material. It is also likely that the various forms of video, which are currently quite expensive, will be part of the regular personal computers people have in their homes and offices. So we should expect to see true hypermedia documents for widespread distribution.
I wish there were people in the Electronic Frontier whose moral integrity unquestionably matched the unleashed power of those digital machines … The future is a dark road and our speed is headlong.
There’s something direly mean spirited and ungenerous about inventing a language and then renting it out to other people to speak. There’s something unprecedented and sinister in this process of creeping commodification of data and knowledge. A computer is something too close to the human brain for me to rest entirely content with someone patenting or copyrighting the process of its thought … I don’t think democracy will thrive in a milieu where vast empires of data are encrypted, restricted, proprietary, confidential, top-secret, and sensitive. I fear for the stability of a society that builds sand castles out of databits and tries to stop a real-world tide with royal commands.
We expect within the next six months AT&T will be well on its way to becoming the dominant Internet access provider. No one else can match their reach and their ability to target business and residential customers.