Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, is fond of pointing out that every two years more computing is manufactured than existed on the planet previously. By 2000, Grove estimates, the PC industry will be shipping 100 million Pentium-style microprocessors a year. I think he’s wrong: he’ll be shipping 500 million.
[By 2000] I expect [the Internet] to become the backbone for electronic commerce. I expect it to begin to carry voice and video, and in the process to cause a big ruckus about unfair competition for the common carriers. Governments will want to regulate it. There will be a lot of legal turmoil about privacy, free speech, import-export law, etc. The culture will change to be less of a frontier justice to more of an organized, businesslike world. Usage pricing will begin. Information won’t be free anymore; everything will cost.
High-speed networking is the key enabler for virtually all future applications. Being wired, being able to make arbitrarily large computers from in situ computers. Being able to communicate anywhere without limits, including video for any purpose.
[The technological advancements that will have the biggest impact on business, and the home by 2000 will be,] Radical scenario [for business]: an all-pervasive ATM network that will include an interface to radio and various cable networks. Home: Settop computers that link to TV sets and get the noncomputer people linked for communication, education, games, etc., whether they want it or not. This will move us from a current “plug-and-pray” computer to one that can order and install its own software and can be maintained remotely.
[The expected advancements that will be the biggest disappointments by 2000 will be] object-oriented programming – no significant change in the way software is built or the industry is organized; agents that do useful things; collaboration technology – people will realize it’s nothing more than video in a window.
[The biggest technological surprise to come by 2000 will be] some new digital storage device that enables thousands of gigabytes to be put into a cigarette-box-sized case.
Maybe all computers at the turn of the century will be traditional mainframe computers. They just will be sitting on desktops and other unlikely places. They will be networked. Nobody will know that they are traditional mainframe computers. They will keep this secret.
E-mail, including pagers and fax, will be the predominant form of communication [in the year 2000]. This will be 90 to 95 percent of all communication by contact.
The pure PCs we know and love today will approach 50 percent [in regard to the number of U.S. homes using them]. The TC – a PC that connects to cable and provides TV and Internet access – will also come into existence. Varieties of PCs (i.e., appliances) that do useful things ranging from security to news gathering to taking data from closed captions should emerge. Still no robots in the home.
When you ask consumers what they would be willing to pay for something, the answer is always $10. The burning question, though, is whether it is another $10, or the same $10. My guess would be [that by 2000 they will be willing to pay] $25 more than their basic cable bill is now, but this is on the optimistic side.