Information is as basic to American households as the proverbial basket of groceries. The designers and marketers of new computer, online and interactive services can succeed by solving the information problems that time-sensitive consumers face.
Some are speculating that consumers may be willing to use up to three or four specialized content services this way, but interactive services on the design boards have widely varying potential price/value structures, which makes such speculations hazardous. For example, a home-banking service could be expected to have a different value perception in consumers’ minds than a home-education service for children. In this context, emerging digital-information markets can be expected to take some time to settle pricing issues.
Despite the potential appeal of interactive entertainment, developers should still be concerned about whether lower income and older consumers, who comprise a large part of today’s mass television-viewing audience, will pay monthly fees to access it.
“Virtual” communities may turn out to be the most exciting benefit of the consumer-information revolution.
Digital services that aim to complement rather than replace existing information appear to have the best chances for fast consumer acceptance among early-adopter households.
When I was a child, no one challenged the three-stage model of the development of learning … The VCR, the CD-ROM and now the Internet each represent a step in development that will eventually short-circuit the middle stage and its frustrating and psychologically dangerous dependence on adults and schooling.
Will the Iway be a fiber to the home. No. First: Fiber is inevitable, but inevitable is a long time – practically forever … Second: You want more than a choice of only one Iway fiber, wire or frequency … I vow to stop saying the information superhighway and start using the competitive plural, Iways. Third: … Home hubs and/or servers will plug into various Iways and distribute various services around homes on LANs [local-area networks]. Fourth: For a long time, Iways will not enter or even go right by many homes. Not even 500 channels of HDTV. Businesses will debug the Iways, and then later consumers will buy in.
Xanadu is a system for the network sale of documents with automatic royalty on every byte. The transclusion feature allows quotation of fragments of any size with royalty to the original publisher. This is an implementation of connected literature. It is a system for a point-and-click universe. This is a completely interactive docuverse.
Banks, retailers and others see personal-finance applications as the place where people will pay for things. If Microsoft corners the market and takes a piece of every transaction, they worry Microsoft will get rich at everyone’s expense.
To make sure kids don’t get left behind, parents will rely on technology to supplement a failing educational system. The only problem is, parents know less about technology than their offspring. So they will be forced to turn to consultants.