As networks creep out across the globe we can expect to see more of this remote learning going on and desktop non-video-conferencing has a large supporting role to play. But when they’re being used for teaching and learning, systems based purely on text can sometimes fall short of the mark.
[The Netscape-Java union will] invert the entire world of software in a way that may permanently displace Microsoft from the center of the sphere.
We created virtual reality on paper for years. We did all that on a piece of dead tree … We must try to build a platform to transform the book.
On-demand video also will soon light up the Internet.
The ultimate acceptance of … killer apps hinges on low cost, reliable delivery of interactive multimedia.
People watch television, they talk on the phone, they work on their computers. The tools and toys they have for each of these tasks work just fine, so why would they change?
The digital convergence is a crock. An interesting crock, a press-release-making and share-price-hiking crock, a great source material for hooked-in politicians crock, a cocktail discussion hipness-major-bonus-points crock, but a crock nonetheless. The need for a “digital convergence” can be buried with a hundred different shovels.
Essentially everybody with a workstation and an Internet subscription can become a publishing house and sell information products over the Net.
The middle stage, manufacturing physical copies of the information product, will more or less go away for hypermedia publishing because the users will be creating their own copies on demand as they download information from the Internet.
Either information publishing will be concentrated in a few, near-monopolistic companies, or the ability to publish information will be distributed over many more companies than are now involved. Both trends actually seem plausible due to different characteristics of hypermedia publishing.