Net Gains: Information, Technology & Culture; Breaking the Box | Imagining the Internet

Life After Television

It is companies that shun the PC today in order to cater to the TV, consumer electronics, and telephone industries that will end up in luxury backwaters … Just as the real action was not at Churchill Downs or the Peapack Hunt Club, but in Detroit [in the first years of the automobile], the real action today – the source of wealth and power – is not at Nintendo or Sega, Sony or QVC; it is in the scores of thousands of computer and software companies comprising the industrial fabric of the information age – the exhilarating new life after television.

Life After Television

Three to five more years of Moore’s Law and the PC will be a multimedia machine with some eight times the power and storage capacity at the same price that brought nearly 50 million sales in 1993 and according to Kleskin promises to bring some 55 million unit sales in 1994. At this pace, within four or five years, PC penetration into homes will pass 60 percent. Virtually all these PCs will be connected to networks – most of them with 10 megabits per second or more of bandwidth – and most will run internal buses (linking processors to memory and display) at rates of close to a billion bits a second, ample for full-motion video.

Life After Television

TV problem-solving just distracts computer firms from their huge, and hugely demanding, opportunity to usurp phones, TVs, and video game players entirely with multimedia PCs and networks. The huge telecom and consumer firms must be enlisted in their true role: supplying networks, peripherals, and programs for the computer industry.