The creation and transmission of knowledge will no longer move vertically, from the top down. It will move horizontally, among many people, at a tremendous speed. This will undermine the foundation of every bureaucracy, including schools.
[We look forward to] the implementation of a name service that will allow documents to be referenced by name, independent of their location.
The banking industry wants to introduce digital cash. In the next six months you’ll hear people talk about how they’re going to do it. It will take a decade to fully deploy it. They’re now convinced that we have enough levels of security in the system that it’s harder to counterfeit this than the Federal Reserve note.
Companies guided by shortsighted or skeptical management risk forfeiting a window of opportunity for electronic experimentation.
The media expert foretold the demise of printed material by the year 2000 … “If I were a printer, I would try to get the rights to the bits.”
If you think into the future, the ability to look at more complete information about products that are available in the outside world is going to become strategic.
The World Wide Web, as it currently exists, cannot possibly succeed on the scale now being widely predicted. Web browsers, home pages and HTML-coding courses will all, inevitably, hit the wall.
The enormous market for entertainment, whether it’s movies or interactive games, will pay for much of the construction of a high-capacity highway to the home. The existing highway – the Internet in particular – will connect with it, widening its circuits and its reach, driven especially by the burgeoning business-to-business markets. And off all these arteries, enjoying full access to them, will be hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of smaller communities, linked by geography, line of business, or special interest.
When anything can be put on the market with a couple of clicks of a mouse, there will be even more stupid movies, dull books, sloppy data, and bad analyses – “infoglut.”
We’re going to see a widespread disintegration of U.S. business and the emergence of very different corporate entities.