Unless we continue and expand ultra-high-speed activities we will lose the momentum of industry and academia. We will lose the ability to train a new generation of communication engineers, and, in my mind, we will have failed the next generation of U.S. scientists and entrepreneurs.
If we cease to move forward at this critical time we stand a very good chance of losing our technological leadership in the next century. Our pioneering efforts will transfer to Europe and Asia, with them reaping the commercial benefits of high-speed technology.
Commercial online services … will retain a major role as organizers of distribution – a newsstand, if you will, from which readers will select many popular forms of online content.
What is more important … is the challenge of facing a future in which gigabit-speed networking will be considered slow, in which our communication infrastructure will consist of multi-gigabit, low error, high-latency networks, in which our processing units, while growing faster, will not keep up with increasing communication speeds.
We can expect in a very short period of time an international electronic marketplace where goods of all types – merchandise, information, software, etc. – are bring bought and sold.
As the Internet matures, I expect to see a lot of the same kind of specialization occurring as we have in print. We’ll come to recognize that the roles of author, publisher, manufacturer, distributor and retailer need not be rolled up into the same package.
There are criminals in the world, and some of them are programmers. With computer networks, they have an amplifying effect that they’ve never had before. If I were a criminal with a gun, I might attack one person. But with a computer network, I can attack a million people at a time. It’s like an atomic bomb.
Online products will also continue to be used for some time as “come ons” for other paying services.
I eventually expect to see stand-alone online products sold by subscription; we’re coming very close to the mechanisms needed to make this widespread and widely accepted. In the short term, hybrid print/CD/online products hold a great deal of promise.
The future [of Internet video delivery] is local news.