Unplugged And Undone
(FORTUNE Magazine) – I sit up straight in bed, drenched in sweat. It is pitch-black. The alarm clock shows 3:17 A.M. I'm having a nightmare. I don't often have nightmares, but this one is a doozy. You could call it a broadband nightmare. I've been abducted by my FORTUNE editors. Frightening enough, the prospect of editorial violence. But while they have me locked up, they replace all my computing and communications systems with ancient and obsolescent devices. I am still a venture capitalist in the year 2000, with clients and contacts and friends who expect me to act thoroughly up to date. But my technology is frozen in A.D. 1993, the year the first Web browser appeared. It's like a dream in which I get stuck in mud, and struggling only makes the mud stickier.... I'm driving to work along Silicon Valley's Route 280, once named America's Most Beautiful Highway by Lady Bird Johnson (the wife of the President who made the Vietnam war what it was, for those too young to remember) but now a traffic-choked parking lot. Deciding to call the CEO of one of my portfolio companies, I reach for my Palm PDA to look up the number. Oh. That's right. The Palm wasn't introduced until 1996. I grab my cell phone to dial information. The phone is the size of a small laptop computer, most of it taken up by the nickel-cadmium battery. I've done a really terrible job of managing the battery and use up the ten minutes of juice left in its paltry "memory" trying to get a line. It is dead. I look around my car, desperate. No way to be productive, and creeping along at ten miles an hour. I can't turn on my Rio and play back the Eric Clapton songs I downloaded from the Web. MP3s didn't exist in 1993. So I have to turn on the radio and listen to commercials. Suddenly I find myself in my office. My desktop computer is an Intel 386 machine. It's running Windows 3.1. It doesn't have a real desktop or even a start button. There's no Web browser, so I'm not able to get stock quotes to see how my portfolio companies are doing today. There's no e-mail either, so I can't dash off notes to everyone I have meetings with to let them know I'm falling ever more hopelessly behind schedule. Scenes begin melting into each other. My assistant comes in with a pile of pink message slips. I'm in a plane, and I'm forced to watch the movie because I don't have e-mail to plow through. I get to the hotel, and there isn't a phone jack to plug my laptop in to. I'm going slower and slower. I'll never catch up.... Okay, okay, enough. Maybe I'm oversensitive about all this. I live in Silicon Valley, and even here I'm kind of on the cutting edge in my use of computer and communications technology. I consume as much broadband as you can: T1 line on the office network, DSL on the home network, 56K modem on the road, cell phone with WAP access to the Internet in my pocket. And that's why it would be a real nightmare for me to roll my technology back to vintage 1993: There wasn't any broadband then. For regular people there weren't even any data networks. In fact, the same editors who appear in my nightmare originally asked me to unplug myself for real for one week and use only technology that was available seven years ago, as a kind of experiment. I observed that unlike them, I have a real job and couldn't afford to stop being productive for a whole week. And that's the point: Computing and communications technology has advanced so far that I can't do my job without it. I absolutely depend on the stuff that's been developed over the past seven years: the high-speed Internet and the World Wide Web; the cellular telephone network, even if America's is years behind those in other countries; the applications software on the PC and the way everything has been designed to work with everything else; the devices arrayed around the PC to make information portable. To use Valley talk, the default requirement of life is no longer analog; it is digital. The only issue is how much technology we each decide to integrate into our lives. So the interesting question is, If that's what has happened in the past seven years, what can we look forward to in the next seven? Can you look at the difference between what was true for most of us in 1993 and what is true for most of us in 2000 and see what might be true in 2007? Here's what I think: --The pace of change will keep right on pacing, just as it has for the past 20 to 30 years. Microprocessors will progress from the one-gigahertz chips just coming to market in personal computers to something like 60 gigahertz. PC hard drives will hold one or more terabytes instead of the 30 to 40 gigabytes that are just now becoming standard on hard disks. Communication speeds at home will increase to ten megabits per second (like today's office networks), while the speeds from office networks to the Internet will reach 100 megabits per second. Cellular phones will finally be integrated in a single worldwide standard that encompasses fast data communications, so that you can really use your cell phone as your only phone and get important information fed to you continuously. --Integration is the big challenge of the next seven years. The single most frustrating thing about technology today is that nothing pulls it all together. Like when you try to order a product from a Website you haven't visited for a few months, and you can't remember the password you chose two years ago. Or when you get a message on your cell phone's voice mail and can't forward it to your assistant's voice mail at work. Or when you want to move funds from an account at a bank to an account at a stockbroker, and you have to either write a check or fill out a form and mail it in. I recently leased a new car that comes with a navigation system, a car phone that doubles as a portable when you unplug it, an emergency communications system, and voice controls for the telephone and navigation system. But the phone directory that responds to voice commands is different from the phone directory built into the cell phone; the emergency communications system uses a cellular technology that is different from the one in the car phone; the navigation system recognizes the global positioning system but can't use the cell phone or the Internet to get local intelligence (to automatically find the nearest Starbucks when I'm in need of coffee, for instance). In 2007, I would certainly expect that high-speed communications networks would help different systems work together. --The hammerlock Microsoft has on digital technology will be broken. Personal computers will always be essential to productivity in the office, but increasingly if you aren't working in an office, you won't need to use personal computers. Instead, you will be doing more and more work with devices that don't look like or act like PCs. Cell phones will know where you are, and digital devices will be able to send your music, photographs, video, and data wherever that might be--office, home, car, hotel, airplane, or walking around town. The key to all three of these outcomes is broadband technology. Right now, broadband is the exception: You have to go to the office or be lucky enough to get DSL or cable-modem service at home. Meanwhile, your PC modem is still slow as molasses when you travel and your cell phone doesn't always work for voice communications, much less for sending data back and forth. Just getting to the point where broadband technology is ubiquitous--say, data communications at a rate of a megabit per second everywhere you go all the time--will qualitatively change your work and home lives once again. This means that all the pipes we use for data and voice applications--telephone lines, television cables, satellites, wireless radios, the Internet backbone, whatever--must be big enough to eliminate all the bottlenecks and connected well enough for data to flow smoothly among them. That, of course, is a tall order. But it will be the key accomplishment of the next seven years. That's the way technology works: in fits and starts, bit by bit. It sneaks up on you and insinuates itself into your life, until seven years later you find yourself using it without even thinking about it. It will become indispensable, so that if some guy comes up to you and threatens to take it away, you'll be waking up at three in the morning, drenched in sweat. STEWART ALSOP writes the Alsop on Infotech column for FORTUNE. He is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. |
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