What the Internet can do is act as a bridge along the way, but this type of communication will probably never take the place of face-to-face meetings. It’s much easier to speak to people when you can see how they’re reacting.
For historians, the Internet is going to become an important tool, but there aren’t very many of us who know what’s on it now.
With so much available on the Internet, the time will come when personal computers are not used much for computing, or even word processing. Primarily, computers will become devices for information retrieval and interaction.
To some extent, it’s a “Field of Dreams” business plan – if we build it, they’ll come. We’re not really sure.
Does the fact that people type these words into a machine give them some different status than if they were just speaking out on the street corner?
It’s going to change things the way the advent of the railroads changed people. In the next five to 10 years, we’ll live our lives differently.
A university student living in a remote area can take an entire degree over the Internet without ever having set foot at SFU or any other campus.
Some studies suggest the superhighway might even speed up medical claims, thus cutting health care costs by 20 percent … Experts are talking two million characters per second – a forty-fold increase in speed over current technology. If applied to the 55-mph speed limit, it would mean cars zooming at 2,200 miles per hour … [It will be] “more significant than the industrial revolution.”
We are entering a new economic environment – as different as the moon is from the earth – where a new set of physical rules will govern what intellectual property means, how opportunities are created from it, who prospers and who loses. Chief among the new rules is that “content is free.” … The creator who writes off the costs of developing content immediately – as if it were valueless – is always going to win over the creator who can’t figure out how to cover those costs. The way to become a leading content provider may be to start by giving your content away. This “generosity” isn’t a moral decision: It’s a business strategy.
So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet – which there isn’t – the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.