Data is going to be scattered across lots and lots of different repositories. And a lot of them are relational [databases] on network servers and mainframes. The data, still today, is … pretty hard to get at; it requires customized front-end applications.
The World Wide Web will evolve into an open platform for distributing corporate data.
All of a sudden software like ours starts to make a lot of sense … That compels us to produce better tools to make it easier for them to do that, which is what we’re doing.
Print publishers can start producing video, which is a new thing. So can everyone else. That’s going to be fun to watch. That’s going to be the big hit because everyone in the world is so focused on video right now.
Acrobat will fundamentally change the economics of information by removing the critical barriers that have kept electronic documents from moving between computers. Today’s paper-based information is hampered by the physical media. Acrobat technology liberates information and the flow of ideas and allows it to enter the electronic age.
The “improved communications environments” … are too complex to function within the vast majority of computers now owned by schools and other low-end users. They therefore would be forced to buy expensive computers.
I am very much concerned with the middle class, particularly the lower-middle class. What the hell does the Information Age mean to them? We haven’t answered that question.
It’s my belief that creating demand for universal access (or as near to it as we can come) with 7-by-24 online connectivity and reasonably priced bandwidth increments will enable an explosion of usage that will take the communications infrastructure into the next century.
The greatest threat to the original peer-to-peer Internet is probably the World Wide Web. While the Web was originally conceived as a groupware product, the wide success of Windows-based browsers has created a network in which a great many of the participants are no longer able to provide information, but only to consume it.
In the past, online services had to be publishers of proprietary content in order to attract consumers. In the new world of the Internet, they need to realize a new role as providers of, on the one hand, back-end services such as hosting of online content, billing, and other related services to publishers, and on the other, of navigation, ease of access and other related services to users.