Futurist sees rise of NCs, home networks
A guy walks into a bar, and finds he doesn't have enough money for a
drink. So the guy tells the bartender, "I'll kill every roach in the
bar without making a mess for the price of just one beer." The
bartender agrees and gives the guy a beer, so the guy goes out the
door and yells to the bartender, "Alright, send them out here."
"It's easy to make software work with other software," concluded Arno
Penzias, this year's keynote speaker at the Software Development
conference, "if you control the interfaces."
Penzias, a Nobel Laureate for discovering cosmic background radiation
and currently a venture capitalist at New Enterprises Associates,
delivered his insights Monday evening into the present and future of technology,
touching upon everything from electronic commerce to software
development. His talk was a marked contrast from previous Software
Development keynotes, delivered by the likes of Bill Gates and James
Gosling, in that the scope of his talk was wider, addressing
technology's broader impact on society.
Part of Penzias's keynote was based on his book Harmony:
Business, Technology & Life After Paperwork, in which he discusses
the future of technology. According to Penzias, futurists like
himself always "underestimate the pace at which technology goes, but
always overestimate its social impact." Throughout the talk, Penzias
discussed past (sometimes erroneous) predictions, the present state of
technology, and his thoughts on the future.
Penzias discussed five characteristics of technology today that he saw.
First, he found that there are limitless components, ranging from
memories to displays. While some of these components, such as silicon
chips, will reach their physical boundaries in the next decade,
according to Penzias, there will be other opportunities in less
traditional forms of components, such as rollable displays.
Second, computers today are essentially zero-cost. "I don't see any
bottom to the price of PCs except for the hardware cost," said
Penzias, "and the hardware cost is dwarfed by the operating costs."
Third, Penzias described a category he called "electronic eyes and
ears," essentially alternative forms of user interface. "All of this
typing that we have to do now is not necessary," claimed Penzias, who
said that in the future, only software developers would be using
keyboards.
Additionally, the advent of cheap cameras means that electronic eyes
will be everywhere. As disturbing as the implications might seem to
today's privacy advocates, according to Penzias, economics dictates
the inevitability of this phenomenon, because the cost of not having
these cameras everywhere will be prohibitively high. And this is not
as unusual for society as people might think. "Urban anonymity, the
idea that people won't know what you're doing or won't know who you
are, will, one hundred years from now, look like a small window in
history -- the 19th and 20th centuries," said Penzias.
Fourth, networking will soon have negative cost; in other words, it
will cost more not to have built-in networking in computer devices.
Penzias felt that networking was a more practical solution to bringing
more capabilities to today's appliances. For example, instead of
building voice-recognition into a microwave oven, the oven could
communicate over a network with a PC that would handle the
recognition.
Finally, Penzias discussed today's Internet mania. Noting New
Enterprise Associate's interest in Internet companies, Penzias
examined the question of whether the Internet meant "the end of brick
and mortar," as one of his partners claims. According to Penzias,
it's "not a question of either-or," and he supported his answer by
citing eBay, Charles Schwab, Stevens Creek Software, and a web
consulting business run by a friend's 12-year old son.
Other important Internet-related areas on the horizon, according to
Penzias, are the rise of home networks, storage area networks, and
falling margins due to Internet-enabled comparison shopping.
Penzias concluded his talk by making some predictions about the
future. He began by noting one of his past predictions that was
wrong: that higher-grade users would have access to greater bandwidth
than lower-end users. "Bandwidth is not something you pay for," noted
Penzias. "Bandwidth is something they'll pay you to take."
Other predictions included the rise of something similar to Larry
Ellison's vision of network computers, a greater number of people
working from their homes, and consequently, more home-helpers,
services such as phone-in dinners and medical monitors.
On the future, Penzias had two predictions about which he felt
confident. "We're going to be surprised," said Penzias. "Just think
about it. Five years ago, there was no web." Finally, ending
the evening on a positive note for the software developers in the
audience, Penzias said, "We'll need lots of software to make it all
work."
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