The Future
The remainder of this page was written in late 1999 before the
Wall Street Internet bubble burst. The twentieth anniversary of
the IBM PC in August 2001 has occasioned much commentary on the
past and future and given the faddish nature of the popular
press, current pessimism leads some to ask if we weren't
expecting too much from the Internet in particular and computers
in general. What I wrote below was based on the continued
development of existing technologies and extending current
trends, not on any one or several hot companies or speculative
technologies. In the late summer of 2001, I see no reason to
change a single word of what I wrote nearly two years ago.
Ultimately the web and the networked
applications that grow from it will be the sixth most important
technological advance in human history surpassed only by the
wheel, the printing press, the assembly line/mass production
techniques, the transistor and the computer.
Depending on your point of view, the web and the Internet and
their successors may be the fourth most important technology
advance. Though the web and the Internet are completely dependent
on both the computer and the transistor, it's the web and its
successors that will allow these precursor technologies to reach
their potential.
The web allowed the first truly widespread
communications between otherwise unrelated computers around the
world. In the future, HTTP, the protocol on which today's web is
based will be superceded by other protocols but an ever
growing web of connections will eventually directly or indirectly
connect nearly all computers and other computerized devices
throughout the world. We can only speculate on some of the uses
to which these connections will be put.
Computers have had a growing impact on our work lives for
approximately thirty years. Their direct impact on most of our non
work lives has been very small. Even today, despite all the
publicity the Internet gets, retail purchases over the Internet
are only a few percent of the total. The coming changes in how we
live and work ultimately caused by the web and its successors
will make the previous changes caused by computers look like a
minor blip.
They might even surpass the changes caused by the
first three technologies that I listed. It doesn't require
imagination to foresee the end of the office as we know it today.
All the technologies necessary to provide a complete virtual office for
most white collar workers are already exist. It simply requires making
things faster, more reliable, more convenient and combining functions
that today exist as separate applications. The only real reason many
of us need to go to work today are meetings. Combine the virtual reality
of games with video conferencing and virtual meetings are only a matter
of time. The stuff of science fiction only a few years ago requires
nothing more than the extension and combination of existing technologies.
At this nascent stage in the networked world
no one can predict how these changes will ultimately impact
society and organizations but one thing is certain. Any
organization that fails to make full use of these technologies
and is not able to transform itself to adapt to the coming
changes will become as obsolete and extinct as buggy whip
manufacturers.
Though I list the printing press as the second
most important technology advance in human history, its obvious
to me that the printing press and the entire mass printing
industry are just as doomed today as the buggy whip industry was
in 1900. When every household in the developed world with a
moderate amount of discretionary income has a fast full color
printer connected to a network that can retrieve any information
publicly available anywhere in the world and print only what the
user wants, of what possible use is the massive trash producing
printing industry.
Going somewhat further out, even paper itself
is not likely to survive. When light weight flat panel display
technology reaches today's printer resolution and is connected to
the network with high speed wireless communications, paper will be obsolete.
Our entertainment will be delivered via large wall mounted
displays and we will each carry voice activated devices that will
replace all need for printed materials. My guess is that these will be
about the size and weight of a clipboard but there will be a
variety of sizes for different situations. These devices will
also respond to any hard pointed stylus where we need to perform
precise positional and drawing type actions. It seems clear to
me that though I don't expect to live to see many of these changes
that they are simply a matter of when and not if.
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