Technology at the Millennium
by Louis J. Bruno

A presentation made to the Yonkers, NY National Exchange Club on March 19, 1997.

As a research professor at Columbia University almost thirty years ago, I used miniature electrodes attached to the surface of the skin to record, among other things, the activity of the heart. To give my subjects freedom of movement, I designed and built small FM transmitters -- no larger than a man's watch -- to send the heart recordings to a standard FM receiver "listening" across the room or across the street. The electrodes were "off the shelf" items from a commercial supplier; the transmitter was made with Radio Shack parts using a design derived from a Popular Electronics project; and the receiver was a Harmon Kardon, much like the one in your den or living room.

If, almost a generation ago, I was able to record and transmit heart activity with no discomfort to the subject, and, if today law enforcement officials routinely locate stolen vehicles by remotely activating and tracking an electronic transmitter (Lojack), how come when Aunt Matilda with the bad ticker goes waltzing her cardiologist doesn't monitor her heart for signs of arrhythmia? Why has technology come of age for your hijacked Honda but not for your aging aunt?

The answer is that technology today -- and at the millenium -- is driven not by research but by the marketplace. And this is as it should be, for technology is defined by Webster as the practical application of knowledge. What will be available tomorrow is determined more by what manufacturers supply and consumers demand than by what scientists discover in the laboratory.

MARKETPLACE FACTORS

Scratch a retailer -- especially a New York retailer -- and you'll find a structure of price. Most retailers, like most people, think the marketplace is driven almost entirely by price. But if that were true we'd all be driving used two-door gray Hyundais. While price may be the determinant of last resort -- all other things being equal -- it's the other "things" that determine what comes to market and stays there. Here's my "shortlist" of the factors that have helped me -- a psychologist turned retailer turned PC consultant -- make sense of technology in the marketplace. We'll take a look at my list then examine some of the technological trends that will take us into the millennium.

QUALITY. You don't need to be a social scientist to nominate quality as a dominant marketplace factor. Even though they initially cost a bit more, we all learned to enjoy the higher quality of audio cassettes over the older 8-tracks which didn't sound as good and didn't last as long. Of course it helped that Sony invented a cassette walkman not an 8-track walkman (which would never have fit in your shirt pocket).

So using the quality argument we could reasonably expect that the new miniature CD-walkman will eventually dominate the market for personal stereos. Wrong. The CD-walkman sounds better but not a lot better. The difference between a handheld mono portable -- you know, the tinny pocket radio used by old men at the ballpark -- and a stereophonic receiver whose headphones occluded outside noises and engulfed your brain in a sea of stereophonic sound was enormous. Folks paid the price. The difference between really good stereo sound from a cassette and great sound from a CD is only worth only a small price differential, however, and few users will pay the price since switching formats mean changing their collecting and sharing habits. Inertia wins!

Virtually the same circumstances have kept the video disc player from becoming more than a high-priced curiosity. The sound and image quality from a video disc is undeniably superb. But it's hard to rent them, they're expensive to buy, and you can't use a video disc player to time-shift the soaps. So does quality count? Yes, but inertia (and value) win out.

However, you will soon see in the marketplace a good example of a high quality product replacing one of lower quality as removable hard drives come to replace diskette drives (floppy drives) in off-the-shelf PC systems. Although removable drives, like the Zip drives from Iomega, cost more than diskette drives, they're faster, have much higher storage capacity, and are almost impervious to damage. With programs (and data) taking up more and more space, and the need for safe backups increasing, you can expect the removable hard drive to become a permanent feature in the next generation of PCs. In the case of removable drives, quality dominates because the higher price is offset by the drive's ability to function as a hard drive (albeit slower than a built in) and as a backup drive, eliminating the need for a separate, slow tape backup.

INERTIA. Anyone who hates to get out bed in the morning can understand how inertia can play an important role in whether a new product will sink or swim. Consider how long it took for America -- land of the free and home of the indolent -- to switch from dial to touch-tone phones, despite the fact that touch-tone phones are inherently easier to use. When the existing product is good enough, as dial phones were, it can take as much as a generation for the newer, better product to gain widespread use. People simply don't spring for the new version 'til the old one wears out. This is what we can expect for high definition television, and for electric cars when they become price-competitive. The same goes for major appliances. The new and better refrigerators and washing machines designed today won't be in widespread use for 15-30 years -- not until the old ones wear out.

WORLD-SHRINK. But inertia doesn't apply when it comes to new products which make the world seem smaller. Most of these are "communications" products. Since the days of Columbus, and probably before, people have gone to great lengths to try to put the rest of the world within arm's reach. CNN built a world-wide following by making live-on-the spot coverage of events in Tunisia as immediate and real as a cockfight in New Jersey. Email and chat rooms make it easy to correspond instantly with friends across the continent and across the ocean. And the aptly-named World Wide Web makes it seem no big deal to peek into the Queen's apartment in England, to download an enhanced video driver from a manufacturer in Germany, or to watch the sun set over Mt. Fuji in Japan.

Despite the sometimes outrageous posturing of our leaders, people throughout the world are curious about each other, and given the opportunity, extend delightful courtesies to one another. Nothing makes this clearer than the interchange of ideas and commerce that occurs on the Internet. While this interchange itself helps shrink the palpable world, the fact that it takes place largely in English fosters English as a universal language, making the world seem to shrink even faster!

SPEED. We're willing to pay to shrink the world and we're also glad to pay to make it spin faster -- seemingly. Everyone complains about how quickly new computers become obsolete, but as soon as the available operating speed changes by an order of magnitude (a factor of 10) we're in line again to drag home the newest and fastest. (A few of us are old enough to remember when this used to happen every few years with the "horsepower" of cars.) If you already own a high-speed Pentium PC, Andy Grove at Intel probably won't get you to budge for a Pentium 200 Pro (50% faster than a standard 200) or a Pentium 200 MMX (optimized for multimedia), but as soon he announces an Optimum or an Incubus or whatever at 10 times the current going speed, he and his marketing honchos are pretty sure you'll start casting about for ways to rationalize the purchase of a new, faster PC. You're already half way out the door to get that new 16X CD-ROM whose speed makes the flight simulator seem frighteningly real, aren't you?

TEAM TECHNOLOGY. One of the things that makes Andy at Intel and Bill at Microsoft and Lou at IBM successful is that they share technology. That sounds easy enough to do when we talk about it, but think of how difficult it is in fact to decide to share (sell) your proprietary technology to a competitor. Years ago, a number of manufacturers -- with Panasonic in the lead -- developed the VHS video recorder technology that you use today. The reason you use it is that Sony, whose BETA technology was demonstrably better, wouldn't share it with anyone but the consumer. Sure, a lot of you bought BETA recorders. But the buying public longterm prefers a single standard where it makes sense to have one. And in the long run, the Panasonic consortium simply overwhelmed lonely Sony with its marvy BETA.

In computers the single standard, shared vs. consortium story is being played out again today. The IBM/Microsoft/Intel camp shares hardware and software and competes with Apple who, until very recently, refused to license its hardware or operating system. As you probably know, Apple, whose product like Sony's BETA was really far superior, is now in deep trouble, with little likelihood of recovery. In fact, just a few days ago, Apple announced a major personnel layoff. Since the remaining Apple personnel are a valuable asset, you can look forward to a takeover by one of the Big Blue consortium, probably within a few months. Do you think the Gateway cow likes apples?

Quality, Inertia, World-Shrink, Speed, Team Technology -- along with price, ease of use, and value -- these are the factors which in my experience predict the success of technological products in the American marketplace. As I said at the start, this is my "shortlist". It is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather to share with you some of the factors that over the years helped me to think about the role of technology in the marketplace.

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

THE INTERNET. With or without my shortlist, you probably have come to realize the importance of the Internet. If the last 10 years were the decade of the personal computer, the next ten will surely be called the decade of the Internet. With every American home and business soon to be in possession of a powerful PC equipped with a high-speed modem and plenty of cheap memory, the Internet is quickly becoming indispensable. It's no mistake that President Clinton recently announced the national goal of having every 12-year old child know how to log on to the Internet by the year 2000.

Although the Internet encompasses several powerful tools, including FTP and Telnet protocols, internet chat and "telephone", and of course newsgroups, it's email and the World Wide Web that are revolutionizing our daily lives. Email is global, nearly instant communication between you and your clients, you and your friends, you and the kids at college, you and the president, etc. Why email? For speed, for world-shrink, and for ease of scheduling. The mail you write tonight after dinner will be waiting for your early-bird friend or client tomorrow before breakfast. And it's just as easy to send the same message to all the members of the Exchange Club as it is to send it to one member. And your email, unlike a fax, is ready to be forwarded, copied, pasted and otherwise handled just like any other text document in your computer. You can do it from home, your office, your motel room, even your car, and you don't need a secretary, a typewriter, envelopes, stamps, or a mail box. Email shrinks the world and puts you in nearly direct touch. Let's hope that over the next decade the postal service gets good at delivering packages, because by 2010 or so 90% of your mail will be handled via the Internet!

The Internet means email but it even more so it means the World Wide Web -- the now infamous superhighway of information -- which is like having the libraries, museums, government agencies, newspapers, and companies of the world all waiting for you to explore at the press of a key. If you haven't tried this yet for yourself, I urge you to get with a friend or visit a cybercafe and see what the commotion's all about. You must know there's something to it when a sixteen-hour outage on America OnLine last October was headline news on TV, the radio, and the next day's major newspapers!

To help put you in the picture, let me list some of the things you'll be doing on the Internet on a routine basis in the next few years. (In fact, you could be doing any or all of them today.) Reading the newspapers (the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the London Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal are all out there, many offering personalized editions); banking (you just can't get cash; but you can download your transaction information into personal finance software, like Quicken); checking and adjusting your portfolio; catching up on sports; shopping for food, for books (the world's largest bookstore is not in London or New York, it's on the Internet!),etc.; using interactive dictionaries, thesauruses, glossaries, and encyclopedias; sorry to remind you, but you could be filing your taxes online; reviewing the latest exhibits at the museum around the corner or the one across the globe; getting travel information (hotels, flights, sightseeing) and making reservations; getting correct zip codes from the Postal Service then drawing maps with travel directions; getting the latest medical information; finding a new home; or just checking the weather. Oops, I left out some of the fun things, like playing interactive games across the 'net with your pal in Iowa, getting the skinny on your favorite star, or checking out the current edition of Playbill, Seventeen or Elle online. Really, I left out far more than I included, but hopefully the picture's coming into focus.

The Internet, of course, is a two-way street. Not only will you be using it regularly for lookup and reference, but it won't be long before you and your company have a presence of your own. At the millennium a company without a website will be like a company without a telephone. Websites promote your business, handle customer relations, and provide another store from which to sell your products. And for now, the nice thing is that folks who come to your store can all read and afford a computer (well almost all).

But websites aren't only for business. Since many content providers (America OnLine, CompuServe, for example) and some Internet service providers (like Netcom) offer free website space, for the price of unlimited Internet access (about $20/month these days) anyone with a mind to can develop a personal website. What for? A teenager on Long Island shares her poetry. Another is the author of a fabulous site that compares online services. A retired scientist upstate shares his mineral collection. Rodney found another place to "get no respect". Al Roker posts his schedule, his travel journal, and his intriguing cartoons. People share their grief over the death of a loved one, their joy in parenting, or pictures from their dream vacation. One feisty Michigan wordsmith posts her own Word A Day with etymological fancy. Books that might never have seen the light of day get published.

Think the Internet's not for you? Well, you're certainly entitled to your opinion. Fortunately for you, our society by and large maintains backward compatability. You can if you want get around on horseback and pay your bills in cash -- it's just that hitching posts are becoming few and far between. For the rest of us, the Internet with its email, websites and other service protocols is quickly becoming as much a part of daily life as the telephone.

REMOTE OFFICING. As I talk with people about technological developments, I often hear them remark about how scary it is that "things are changing so quickly". "It's so hard to keep up," they say. And then I wonder: Are they talk about the technology or the change in the fabric of our lives made possible by technology?

Our society in a sense has come full circle. We started as a nation of hardy pioneers, each looking out for himself. We settled, developed an agrarian economy, then as the industrial revolution took hold, became a nation of manufacturers, with most of us working for large companies or the government. Now, as our economy shifts toward the service sector and virtually every large company and governmental agency has a "department of downsizing", we find ourselves, more and more, becoming pioneers -- independent contractors -- forging new, unique careers that change almost daily to meet the needs of a world in global shrink. And that, I suppose, is scary.

Or maybe it is the technology that makes it possible to have your office "in your pocket" that is scary. Without thinking very much about it, each of us who buys a new PC these days winds up with a powerful processor, lots of memory to permit multiple tasks to be carried out simultaneously, a high speed modem, and an operating sytem -- Windows 95 -- which was built for networking. Let me repeat that: Windows 95 was built for networking. Add network cards to the new PCs in your office, some cable to connect them, and you can print on Jane's high-speed laser while she updates the client database you both share.

But that's just the beginning. Using your modem you can connect to the Internet via dial-up-networking with the same ease and with almost the same speed of transfer you have to Jane's PC. But maybe you knew that. But did you know that with your modem and dial-up networking you can also connect to Jane's PC if it happens to be in her home or her car? And did you know that with the addition of remote control software you can also operate any PC on the office network from the tranquillity of your den or midst the din of family dinner?

Still not scared? Add an ISDN phone line (higher speed, multiple conversations) and a webcam and you and Jane can eyeball each other (makes it hard to work in your bathrobe, however), talk on the phone, and work together on the same graphic presentation project resident on either PC. Now the meaning of "remote officing" starts to take shape.

As we move from standard telephone lines (28.8 kbits/second) to ISDN (64 kBits) in the next few years, and then to cable modems (27 mBits using TV cable) in 5-7 years, the connection you'll make via modem will be better than the one you can make on a local area network. When working at home will be faster, more flexible (mom and pop can finally share parenting without penalities), and less costly, why would anyone commute to an office to work?

Of course, as laptops become cheaper due to economies of scale, and direct satellite communications become practical, we could become a planet of nomads whose only permanent address is our email address. Now that's scary.

(Send email for me to drlou@installationsplus.com)