The infrastructure companies – the cable and phone companies – will be providing these services for around $20 a month. Once these technologies come into play, users will benefit from a data rate that is almost 10 times as great as what is currently available.
There is a significant advance coming in the next year, when 28.8 modems will include a built-in feature that will allow simultaneous voice-data capability.
The way you browse local information and the way you browse remote information will be a seamless experience.
The reason the Internet will be as important as the IBM PC is because there are literally thousands of companies – Microsoft and others – that are focusing on the Net as their primary strategy across their entire product lines.
The future of the PC is clearly as a communications tool.
Nobody knows what the split eventually will be between free and commercial sites on the Internet. Ultimately, consumers will decide.
Even in its early stages, the transition to inexpensive communications represented by the Internet is leading people to question old assumptions – sometimes without even realizing it … Only some of the companies laying bets on the Internet will be winners. But companies that bet against the Internet will be losers.
The Internet is a tidal wave. It will wash over the computer industry and many others, drowning those who don’t learn to swim in its waves.
Fair Information Practices may be required to help ensure that active badges are a convenient technology which do not degrade people’s working lives. Other kinds of information practices, such as those in which location monitoring is non-reciprocal, and non-discretionary may help transform some workplaces into electronic cages.
CSCW creates a new electronic frontier in which people’s rights and obligations about access and control over personally sensitive information have not been systematically articulated … we need to better understand the nature of information practices with regard to different CSCW applications that balance fairness to individuals and to their organizations.