It’s 2000, and American homes bulge with the latest multimedia gizmos. By now, consumers have already been purchasing everything from pepparoni pizzas to portfolio investments online for years. Still, few people have time to sit at the computer … you can profit from this problem by becoming a personal shopper who knows what goods, services and information are available anywhere online.
Netscape is … betting that companies will want to create their own in-house Webs – advanced networks with state-of-the-art graphics. These tapestries of information will then help firms stay in close touch with employees in far-flung divisions, as well as with customers and suppliers.
An Internet e-mail address is quickly becoming a requirement for business communication, as a fax number did in the U.S. around 1988.
Need tickets to a Broadway show? Your computer will handle the transaction. Just give it a price range, seating preference and a credit card. Computers will even make it easier for you to link to a doctor in another city or connect people around the world in virtual classrooms. “Those kind of technologies will become ubiquitous with more processing power.”
Whether you like it or not, there are people in Washington that have more control over your future than Microsoft does.
Perhaps the organizations most concerned about losing out if the government does not play a big role in the data superhighway are libraries, schools, hospitals and other public institutions. If the highway is built and run by private interests without significant government investment, these institutions might not be able to afford hooking up to the network.
There needs to be more core infrastructure, and I don’t care how we get there. If the government kick-starts the market, it will happen more quickly, and that makes sense.
ISDN could easily be upgraded to a higher capacity once new markets open … ISDN is the best solution in light of the difficult economy facing the Clinton Administration.
I think the government should not build and/or operate such networks. I believe that the private sector can and will be incented to build these networks.
If the federal government sets out to build a high-speed digital infrastructure, that will be a kind of competitive spur. You will have competition between private and public sectors, and that would be a wonderful thing for the infrastructure.