All of the online services are basically becoming TCP/IP services. Their users are going to be able to run whatever software they want – it may be ours or somebody else’s, but all these services know this. Microsoft is realizing that proprietary services are going to be a dead end.
Standards are a good thing. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the academics and debates, but the issue is that things have to interoperate on a network. I think the devil’s in the details. Are the standards created from the top down, like interactive TV, or from the bottom up? Is there room for innovation in the process? If there is, then the process is going to be successful.
We’re going to make it possible for people to plug in anything they want.
There’ll be high bandwidth, but it’ll be integrated into the other environments, like everything else has been.
Electronic communities will revolutionize “how people interact with information.” … The communities will create a new way for scientists to record and share information and insights … This linkage ability, Schatz predicts, will turn computer networks into something much more than the high-powered library and communications systems they are today.
If the world is split into those that are wired, and those that aren’t, we will continue to walk the razor’s edge of revolution and civil strife. If, on the other hand, we welcome the previously disenfranchised into the information age, and give them a voice along with ours, we can use this technology to unite the world – not in vying for market share, but with stories and art, celebrating the human experience.
With the advent of digital cash, anyone can set up their own stories-serving station – hundreds upon thousands of little self-sufficient magazines, supported by communities of folks who care to share … Reporters will then leave major media, set up their own content-serving stations … We’ll all forget about money, sit around and make art, and tell each other stories, while computers handle all the problems of the world. Why not?
Profits on the Net won’t come from mass-market media; they will come from millions of miniscule fees, per-story tributes to usefulness.
Java is going to be the DOS of the 90s. It may not be perfect, but neither was DOS in its first iterations. Its chief benefit is its ubiquity … with Java, content wins.
Every community, from really big ones to really small ones, will have a nice collection. It will be indexed. There will be ways of accessing it and correlating it. So what you’ll begin to see is that there really will be the Interspace …This will be where people live … Just like television became ubiquitous – the Net is the world of 10 years from now … The vision of the pioneers was always education not entertainment – the Net should become the way that ordinary people can solve their problems. This new research technology might be the way toward that vision, toward the Interspace.