Spinning a Wider Web

...face new competition—just as some manufacturing workers in industrialized countries have experienced competition from developing nations over the past decade...

...Bill Gates is quite aware that "there's never been a leader from one [computer] era who was also a leader in the next...

...The art of maintaining a Web site is in its infancy, and there may be a shakeout this year as companies whose customer base lacks the equipment needed to access the Web find that their sites are generating little commerce...

...The computer resources we use—word processing software, for instance—will then be stored not (as at present) on our hard disks but on rented space somewhere on the highway...

...No doubt some readers of The New Leader have tried exploring the World Wide Web, the Internet's graphical interface, and found the experience sorely disappointing...

...There will be another consequence, as well...

...But in the foreseeable future, the author predicts, "Areas such as Bangalore in India, or Shanghai and Guangzhou in China, will install highway connections...

...Instead of storing these cultural trophies at home, we will pay for the right to access them as needed from a firm on the highway...

...The audience for the electronic communications that started to emerge at the end of the 19th century—sound recordings, films, radio, and television—was huge practically from the outset...

...What is more, competing technologies might make the expense unnecessary...

...For the moment, it is embodied in the Internet, the network of computers created by the U.S...

...A time may well come when these expedients will not suffice, but by then broadcast (over-the-air) alternatives to fiber optics, involving a vastly lower investment in infrastructure, might be available...

...Users of PCs started gravitating to "systems that give them a choice of hardware suppliers and the widest variety of software applications...

...We may also want to store our records on the highway rather than on our own computers, because (as Gates sees it) we will have vast amounts of data to store: Powerful wallet-sized computers will in effect film, photograph or tape any part of our daily activities...

...Nor will the confusion be dispelled for at least several years, and many of the companies that are so eagerly placing bets on the construction of the physical network will certainly lose them...

...recorded music...

...Not until the 1980s did desktop personal systems become sufficiently low-priced and powerful to take over such fundamental business functions as budgeting and word processing...

...electronic versions of such printed materials as books, magazines and newspapers...

...And despite its facile air of optimism about the future, The Road Ahead is fundamentally honest about the real consequences of constructing what the Clinton Administration erroneously calls the "National Information Highway...

...Will the "networkcentric" vision prevail...

...In areas not wired for cable, it may be possible to increase the bandwidth of copper wires, too...

...all the computers will join together to communicate with us and for us...

...Yet ownership will become highly, perhaps intolerably, abstract, and access rights might mean little if a supplier went out of business or stopped supporting this or that format...

...Be that as it may, anyone who is actually on line already finds it far easier to receive information and promotional literature by dialing into the Web than by attempting to navigate a typical touch-tone telephone answering system...

...These computers happened to be based on Microsoft's operating systems, DOS and Windows...

...But his long-term strategy—focusing on software and mostly leaving the hardware to others—makes as much sense today as it did in 1975, the year he dropped out of Harvard and founded Microsoft...

...that they will use to offer the services of their highly educated workers to the global market...

...Besides the latest releases of computer programs, our "assets" on the highway will eventually include movies...

...Professional people "in industrial countries will...

...At this stage, the kind of highway Gates envisions would require a network of fiber-optic materials, with switching equipment based on the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) computer protocol...

...Microsoft stands to benefit from its ability to buy professional skills in the cheapest markets...

...Interconnected globally, they will form a network, which is being called the information highway...

...moreover, the utility of the most popular computers and programs, such as Lotus 1-2-3 (the spreadsheet), stemmed largely from their ubiquity...

...At present, almost any sort of information, from audio to video, is cheap and easy to duplicate...

...There would be much less reason, though, to resist accessing, let us say, the newest version of Microsoft Excel from the highway whenever we wanted to create or modify spreadsheets—if the highway became faster and more reliable than it currently is...

...That wi 11 enable us to connect with our own programs and data through whatever computer may happen to be available to us at any given place or time...

...and multimedia documents combining text, audio, illustrations, full-motion video, and animation...

...Now that computing is astoundingly inexpensive," proclaims the richest prophet of all time, "we stand at the brink of another revolution...

...Software "agents" will roam it, looking for news and products that might interest us...

...This one will involve unprecedentedly inexpensive communication...

...That is not to suggest the physical network won't have to be upgraded...

...For the thing that is really important about the Internet is its international character...

...It remains almost impossible, though, to transmit many kinds of data, particularly full-motion video, over a computer network...

...the costs of recording documents on clay tablets were very high...

...External data storage might be even harder to accept, since it would make personal documents much more accessible to hackers and to the government...

...Within several years, the bandwidth of the coaxial cables used for cable TV will increase greatly, and they will be capable of transmitting "video on demand"—showings from vast computerized libraries of motion pictures and similar entertainment products that we will be able to start, stop and resume on our computers or TV sets, thus liberating us from the limitations and rigidities of video stores and television networks...

...Why that is about to change forms the subject of Gates' book...

...This development will probably create the beginnings of a market for more ambitious highway services, for as Gates observes, "consumers already understand the value of movies and are used to paying to watch them...

...For it is not clear, so far, exactly which hardware "bricks" will be used to build the information highway...

...Defense Department in the 1960s...

...Furthermore, the Internet is becoming a valuable research tool for many people: The rival branches of government in Washington—at least when they are open?have started competing for our attention and loyalties by making an enormous number of public documents available...

...With rare exception, today's Web sites merely recycle conventional print documents electronically...

...But Gates and the others who strive to influence our destiny in these matters believe that within a decade, computer networks will become vastly more important than individual PCs...

...While Gates points out that this cannot happen without "a major technological breakthrough," he also informs us that he has invested in a company that is attempting to achieve one...

...At its offices I have an Internet connection that is much faster than the standard telephone link in ordinary American houses...

...Four thousand years ago, literacy was confined to a minuscule priesthood...

...At this point the basic facts of the information economy came into play: Costs could be spread over a large user base...

...That market, in turn, accounts for "much of the product's value," notes Bill Gates—the founder of Microsoft, the world's biggest software company—in The Road Ahead (Viking, 286 pp., $29.95...

...Clearly, this is how Microsoft envisions itself generating the bulk of its revenue when that day finally dawns...

...The already large audience for the information industry's products and services will therefore become truly worldwide...

...One of the most remarkable aspects of this new technology is that it will eliminate distance," Gates rightly declares...

...ALTHOUGH THE CD-ROM disk accompanying The Road Ahead adds little to the text, the book itself has genuine merit as an introduction to the technologies that promise to transform our lives and our work...

...A true information highway will need much more "bandwidth" (a measure of the amount of data a circuit can move in a second) than is now provided by the copper wire telephone system connecting the Internet to most houses...

...In other words, extremely large investments that cannot be justified by existing markets for new services would be necessary...

...Will you...

...We will surely find it a great convenience to store books and music "virtually...

...As it turns out, it was less "surfing" I disliked than waiting...

...Until now, professional people in developed countries have taken advantage of "irrationalities" in world markets—that is, the fact that businesses have been restricted by geography in their choice of employees...

...But computers, the next great advance in electronics, were at first rare and expensive...

...An Internet of this kind already works reasonably well, for it is simply a way of letting users access information materials that interest them...

...and they fell little, if at all, for each new copy (the "marginal cost...

...I was among their number until several months ago, when I became an editor at a professional association's Web site (a collection of computers storing articles, papers, and other materials that members can call up on their PCs...

...These initial conditions have since been stood on their head: The industry's marginal costs are now unusually low, thanks in part to the very large market for much of its output...