Strolling Along the Info-Highway
The Information Super-Highway isn’t a product or even a coherent strategy. It’s just the most recent negotiating position.
Archives: Expert Predictions
Backlash: The Infobahn Is a Big, Fat Joke
All networks aren’t created equal. Bandwidth must be configured to be useful, and the switched topology of voice telephony is fundamentally different from the broadband/broadcast character of cable television. These systems … will not converge … There really is a man behind the curtain, Dorothy. Pay no attention to the convergence pyrotechnics. There’s a lot at stake, and it just might be your digital future.
Backlash: The Infobahn Is a Big, Fat Joke
There will be no convergence. There will be no 500-channel future. There will be no $3 trillion mother of all industries. There will be no virtual sex. There will be no infobahn. None of it.
New Media – What’s Real & What’s Not
New Media is likely to be both more profound than the headlines would indicate and less familiar than the facile business strategies of today can easily comprehend.
New Media – What’s Real & What’s Not
Vid-phones will become commonplace in our work lives. They will become everyday in our family lives. We’ll party with them. We’ll avoid travelling by using them. We’ll redefine our relationships with them. We’ll wonder how we ever got along without them.
Turning an Info-Glut Into a Library
Users should be able to add to the library themselves … With this new suite of capabilities, the Internet would become something else altogether – a space of connected information instead of a collection of machines. Schatz calls it the “Interspace.” Others may offer other names, but certainly no one will call it a used book store.
New Media – What’s Real & What’s Not
The only software-driven system that has any chance of greater than 50 percent penetration in U.S. households by the end of this century (a mere 5.7 years away) is the personal computer. And it will probably be an Intel/Microsoft-based PC. There’s no chance that digital interactive set-top cable television boxes will reach that penetration in this decade.
New Media – What’s Real & What’s Not
Convergence is a con job. It’s a con invented as a pain-killer for worried executives. Industries don’t converge: they can’t.
New Media – What’s Real & What’s Not
The technologies are obvious; the businesses in which to use them are not. The real innovation won’t come from multimedia mastery or circuit sorcery. The engineer and the artist are both equally handicapped. The trick is to figure out what a new medium would really look like. The problem is to anticipate a future that is just beyond the obvious but not disconnected from the present. The challenge is to invent a new industry.
Mark Stahlman Gets Real
Judging from whence these ideas have come, current notions of a “successful” Internet should be severely distrusted. The shift from subsidized to commercial operation of the Internet’s plumbing has been going on for a long time and will simply take its course. Expecting Internetworking bandwidth to become so expensive that it will kill all this idle chatter (oops, culture) is paranoid and unrealistic. Expecting it to become a hugely profitable business also flies in the face of the increasingly commodity character of leased lines and packet engines.