Topic: Getting

The networks are getting to the complexity point where humans are not capable of dealing with them any more. Automation of network administration and the automation of the building of networks and the automation of the managing of networks is a huge area of opportunity because it’s beyond anyone’s capability to deal with.

I view the Internet as the correct model. It is a set of roads and highways with a total laissez faire kind of glue around it. There really isn’t any management per se. And so I think that’s a much more viable model for how the world is going to evolve than, say, CompuServe, America Online, or services like Prodigy, where there’s a highly visible control structure, with a signature look and feel.

The people who dealt with print design are now becoming video designers. They’re learning how to use the tools and to express ideas in a time domain. But that’s the transition that will be slow. The world will not just go from print to multimedia overnight. The number of designers who can deal with print media is huge. The number in the video world is much smaller because video production has been so expensive. That is getting democratized too … Technology has liberated designers from a craft-skill requirement, and work can be done by a much broader group of people. As the cost of media tools comes down, the same thing is going to happen with video that happened with desktop design for print.

The shift of information from a paper archive to an electronic one does mean that people won’t read as much stuff off of paper. But they certainly won’t store or send most information that way. There will still be local printing, still copies of reports that you’ll take into your study, still books you’ll read in bed at night. There may be a growing appreciation for fine books. After 500 years of tradition and success, paper is certainly not going to just go away, but the all-consuming, tree-consumptive aspect of paper used as a transportation medium for information is on the verge of going away because of the ongoing emergence of computers that integrate sound, video, and print.