Chapter 7: Implications for Business

For those who have a connection to it, the highway will substantially reduce the drawbacks of living outside a big city. As a consultant or employee involved in a service-related field, you will be able to collaborate easily from virtually anywhere. As a consumer, you will be able to get advice – financial, legal, even some medial – without leaving your house. Flexibility is going to be increasingly important as everyone tries to balance family life with work life … Educational programming will be extensive. All of this will liberate those who would like to abandon city living.

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

As technology makes it easier for a business to find and collaborate with outside expertise, a huge and competitive market for consultants will arise … Businesses that successfully draw on the resources available across the network will be more efficient, which will challenge others to do the same. Lots of companies will eventually be far smaller because using the information highway will make it easy to find and work with outside resources.

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

When employees and supervisors are physically apart, management will have to adapt, and each individual will have to learn to be a productive employee on his or her own. New feedback mechanisms will have to evolve too, so that both employer and employee can determine the quality of work being done … Part-time work and job sharing will take on new meanings … The very nature of almost every business organization will have to be reexamined. This should include its structure and the balance between inside, full-time staff and outside consultants and firms.

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

Your phone or computer will be able to generate a lifelike digital image of your face, showing you listening or even talking. You really will be talking – it’s just that you’ve taken the call at home and are dripping wet from the shower. As you talk, your phone will synthesize an image of you in your most businesslike suit. Your facial expressions will match your words (remember, small computers are going to get very powerful). Just as easily, your phone will be able to transmit an image of your words issuing from the mouth of someone else, or from an idealized version of you. If you are talking to someone you’ve never met, and you don’t want to show a mole or a flabby chin, your caller won’t be able to tell if you really look so much like Cary Grant (or Meg Ryan) or whether you’re getting a little help from your computer.

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

Some people worry that, by eliminating the subtlety of human dynamics in a meeting, videoconferences and shared screens will give corporate gatherings all the spontaneity of a congressional photo opportunity. How will people whisper, roll their eyes at a tedious speaker, or pass notes. Actually, clandestine communication will be simpler at a video meeting because the network will facilitate individual communications on the side. Meetings have always had unwritten rules, but when the network is mediating videoconferences, some rules will have to become explicit … Over time, as we use these facilities, new rules of meeting etiquette will emerge.

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

When the information highway is available, people won’t be limited to audio and still images, because the highway will also transmit high-quality video. The meetings they schedule will more and more often be conducted electronically, using shared-screen videoconferencing. Each electronic participant, wherever he or she is, will look at a different physical screen: a video white board, a television set, or a PC, but each screen will show much of the same image. Part of the screen might show someone’s face, while another part might display a document. If anyone modifies the document, the change will appear almost immediately on all the screens. Geographically distant collaborators will be able to work together in rich ways.

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

Within a few years there will be hybrid communications systems that combine elements of synchronous and asynchronous communications. These systems will use DSVD (and later ISDN) telephone communications to permit the simultaneous transfer of voice and data, even before the full information highway is in place. It will work this way: When companies post information about their products on the Internet, part of that information will include instructions for how a customer can connect synchronously with a sales representative who will be able to answer questions through a voice-data connection.

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

Very soon you’ll check your PC, wallet, or television set – the information appliance of your choice – for e-mail, including bills. When a bill comes in, the device will show your payment history. If you want to inquire about the bill, you will do it asynchronously – at your convenience – by sending an e-mail: “Hey how come this charge is so high?”

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

If you want a sentence to end with a chuckle to show that its meaning is intended to be humorous, you might add a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis. This composite symbol, :-), if viewed sideways, makes a smiling face … These “emoticons,” which are half cousins of the exclamation point, probably won’t survive the transition of e-mail into a medium that permits audio and video.

Chapter 7: Implications for Business

Businesses worldwide will be transformed. Software will become friendlier, and companies will base the nervous systems of their organizations on networks that reach every employee and beyond, into the world of suppliers, consultants, and customers. The result will be companies that are more effective and, often, smaller. In the longer run, as the information highway makes physical proximity to urban services less important, businesses will decentralize and disperse their activities, and cities, like companies, may be downsized.