Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

Driving Microsoft: As Head of its Advanced Technology Group, Nathan Myhrvold Has the Software Giant in the Fast Lane of Development for the Information Highway

The future belongs to those who make fundamental investments in technology … Software winds up having a very important role in many of the aspects of this (digital convergence), in many more things than it did 10 years ago … Enabling digital communications is an innovative step … If the information highway is the right metaphor, Microsoft is looking to become the General Motors of the next century … I hope that five years from now we have a pretty good answer to the question, “Where’d you spend the $500 million?”

Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net

The ability of groups of citizens to debate political issues is amplified enormously by instant, widespread access to facts that could support or refute assertions made in those debates. This kind of citizen-to-citizen discussion, backed up by facts available to all, could grow into the real basis for a possible electronic democracy of the future.

Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net

Everybody knows that only those whose networks connect to everybody else’s have a chance to reach the enormous world market, but nobody knows yet which set of interests – newspapers, television networks, entertainment conglomerates, communication giants – will dominate the mass-market networks of the future.

Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net

A lot more than virtual communities and libraries of text are going to live on the Net in the near future. Digitization is where the future of the Net is likely to collide with other computer-amplified forces in the world … Money is already an abstraction, part of a huge, incessant, worldwide flow of electronic messages. The value gained now by knowing how to move these abstract money messages around the world’s telecommunications networks dwarfs the original value of the goods and services that produced the money.

Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net

It is the right of the citizens to remind elected policymakers that these technologies were created by people who believed that the power of computer technology can and should be made available to the entire population, not just to a priesthood. The future of the Net cannot be intelligently designed without paying attention to the intentions of those who originated it.

Bad Attitude: Business as Usual on the Infobahn

The NII would scarcely be worth building if it offered no more than 500 channels of MTV, no matter how holographic, ambient, and jacked in to the gills. Its real payoff, its visionary promise, would be the possibility of an “Athens without slaves” or a “Jeffersonian democracy” in which people can provide information as easily as they consume it. A networked world offers the possibility of many-to-many communication, permitting widely separated individuals to bind themselves into collectives.

Will Commercialization of Internet Help Libraries?

Commercial usage will change the basic nature of Internet, but said it will not be either “for better or worse, it’s just that more commerce is going to get conducted over Internet.” Competition for customers could increase access to Internet and Wolff is positive that having more users will drive connection prices down. “Absolutely, period,” he said. “The telecommunications industry is categorized by enormous economies of scale. All of that is independent of the NSF and what we’re doing.”