With ISDN bandwidth between PCs, people located anywhere in the world will collaborate as if there were no spatial separation … Consumer manipulation of video will have to wait for ISDN’s successor, the fiber-optic and switch rebuilding that the cable and phone systems are undertaking.
Right now, the file, mail, and directory system is very limited … We need to redesign the basic storage functions of an operating system, ratcheting up its response until it is a highly disciplined object storer.
The incredible advances in chip technology and systems technology such as speech and pen recognition, small portable machines and new approaches to software distribution such as CDs and cable distribution will make the PC more of a communication device than a computation device … Thinking of the new machines simply as improved PCs is a mistake comparable to thinking of PCs as better mainframes.
The idea of information available at your fingertips and instant global communication is realizable. It will happen substantially over the next four or five years. As a result, we may end up suffering a little from information overload, or spend a little more time on the couch, but I see that as a symptom of our success.
In the beginning, I think we’ll see many of the new consumer applications available on public kiosks.
Nobody knows exactly how the information highway is going to unfold … We’re going to have to endure years of speculation and posturing by companies that may or may not bring products to market. It’s going to take a lot of cooperation between companies … No single company is going to dominate the new information highway.
The home build-out will end up costing less than two thousand bucks per home.
The user interface … will have to be very simple to use. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like, but I can guarantee you that it is not going to look like a computer.
Software is the glue that will hold the entire information highway together, and whenever there are huge software requirements, we like to make a contribution.
The holy grail in the consumer market will be to bring new applications into the home. Chief amongst those applications will be software that will provide two-way communications through a new device we call the TV/PC.