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Present other pages The War on Terrorism trends and currents past | future new economy | diffusion of innovations

I haven't lived chronologically. No one does. Each moment reaches backward and forward to all other moments. The interweaving of elements from my life's work -- out of chronology, as echoes and foreshadowings -- is true, I think, to the inner shape of any life.

Richard Avedon, Autobiography

The Internet was a different place before business got involved. It may have been a better place, too. Looking back, however, e-commerce and the dot-comming of American business seem inevitable. Learn more about the diffusion of innovation in a society.

Where are we now? How are organizations changing? Is it an evolution or a revolution? Some call it the transformation of the enterprise. Is it really a New Economy? What evidence do we have? What tools can we use to chart what's happening?

The comprehensive story of this transformation won't be written while we're at the beginning of it, as we are now. The best we can do is note the trends and watch them develop. The War on Terrorism provides a compelling case study.

Increasingly, computers are becoming:

small, fast, cheap

Moore's Law

broadband: Internet2; Next Generation Internet

Soon your belt buckle will do more than Windows does now. You will be able to walk up to any flat screen and go to the personal web site of anyone you recently stood near.

visual

broadband multimedia; streaming media; two-way streaming media; interactive two-way video

gone: traditional TV and radio broadcast, local stations

pay: by the minute or flat-rate fees?

networked

They all talk and listen to each other. peer to peer

Qwest's worldwide fiber backbone

fiber to the home

wireless => mobile => ubiquitous

IPv6

Business-to-business directories: user information in one controlled-access place

converged

Two separate networks for voice and data will quickly diminish. IP telephones will replace standard phone sets and, together with desktop computers, will increase workforce efficiency by letting the

databases can interact with the voice systems

gone: the circuit-switch analog telephone system

embedded

You can't see them.

invisible computer

gizmos

Common objects have IP numbers and a full-fledged operating system. They'll be able to listen and speak. Paranoid, anyone?

E-commerce will leak into cell phones, handhelds, TV remotes, dashboards, refrigerators, and pantries. Buy anything, anywhere, with hardly a second thought -- or no thought at all, using e-commerce agents.

Battle for the Unseen Computer
by Claire Tristram
Tech Review, May 2001

Windows won the war for the desktop. But there's a new struggle over operating systems embedded in everyday objects, and this time free software has the inside track.

universal

Everyone will have them.

Diffusion of innovations

global stats at Nua

Policy-based management (access, quality of network service, etc.) on centralized policy servers.

ubiquitous

They're always on, everywhere, as pervasive as electricity.

BMyPC.com, WebOS.com, My Desktop

Say goodbye to the personal computer and hello to personal dataspace
by Sean M. Dugan
Infoworld, September 11, 2000

So we're staring at an imminent explosion of devices, all with different form factors and functions. About the only thing they have in common is a processor and the capability to communicate via the Net.

This highlights the importance of creating abstract personal spaces where our data can live. No one will want to be shackled to the notion of which hard drive holds our data; we'll just want access to the data. No one will be sympathetic to systems that expect your identity to be connected to a particular device; we'll just expect that your company knows us, regardless of our devices.

This is about much more than file synchronization or having a few megs of server space that's accessible via the Web. A personal dataspace is to remote storage what the SR-71 is to the Model T. File synchronization, as it stands today, is a nightmare. It's tedious, arcane, inefficient, and counterintuitive. We need to radically advance the science of moving data around. We need to aim for everyone having a ubiquitous personal dataspace.

The goal should be nothing less than a seamless data experience. No matter what device I own, I should be able to access any and all of my data on it. That means Webphones, handhelds, game consoles, and PCs.

Devices should synchronize data in the background. You should not have to consciously move a file around.

Information sharing among business partners

Small companies aggregate to take on larger companies

distributed

They can share unused capacity.

office and home computers process large batch jobs during off-hours

intelligent

They can mimic human intelligence to a limited extent.

natural language, learning, self-reproducing robots

The first goal of Artificial Intelligence will be to build cyborgs that are smart enough to do our work. This will lead to the bigger challenge of building cyborgs stupid enough to want to attend our meetings.

-- Nicholas Petreley, InfoWorld Electric

easy

They're easy / natural to use.

 ?? If you have the patience of Job.

adaptive: speech recognition, gesture recognition, text-to-speech conversion, language translation, and sensory immersion

trusted

Digital ID; digital signatures

standardized

proprietary --> open standards

educational standards

Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM)

Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF)

SchoolTone Alliance

Extensible Markup Language (XML)

scarcity vs abundance

two paragraphs of scarcity thinking followed by two paragraphs of abundance thinking.

Record Exec Rains on MP3 Parade
by Chris Oakes
Wired News, June 17, 1999

Kenswil also took a stab at the sacred medium on which MP3 is riding: the Internet. The Internet, he said, is simply not a network capable of replacing the current distribution channels for delivering music to consumers. There's not nearly enough bandwidth.

To meet the record industry's current distribution rate of 30 million albums per week, the Internet would have to move 15 million gigabytes per week, equivalent to the amount of data contained on 30 million CDs. He cited estimates of the current data transfer over the Net at 250,000 GB a day -- or 1.75 million GB per week -- as proof that the Net couldn't deliver.

Some in the audience weren't buying it. Independent audio consultant David Weekly said that Kenswil's speech was riddled with holes.

"It's beyond bullshit," Weekly said. "To try to shatter the illusion of Internet music's promise, Kenswil was completely misrepresenting bandwidth, caching, and other properties of the Internet that make it a perfectly viable medium for music delivery."