🚀 go-pugleaf

J Storrs Hall writes:

> In predicting technology trends, look for the most rapid advances
> in areas where the new technology can be acquired incrementally.
> Thus, even though marvelous datacom networks are buildable right
> now, look for big growth in CD-rom first.  Data network services
> will piggyback onto existing phone and cable; by 2000, there may
> be fiber ISDN everywhere, maybe not.

Consider the analogy between personal computers in 1990, and personal
automobiles in 1910. Selling an automobile to an interested individual
was easy. Selling the corresponding infrastructure to society to make
that automobile usable was not. The only way to convince people
(acting vicariously through their governments) to build roadways,
parking, law enforcement, traffic control, health care for accident
victims, etc., was to flood communities with so many automobiles that
people had no choice but to cope. Automakers worked hard to create
traffic problems, and then worked equally hard to persuade governments
to "solve" them. Another important tactic of the auto/steel/rubber/oil
cabal was to deliberately sabotage earlier competing technology (e.g.,
the 50 urban electric light rail systems they bought up and scrapped
between 1930--1950).

Restructuring society to accommodate new technology is "Social
Engineering". Essentially, to develop mass markets for radically new
technology, an industry must change the way people live. This is a
combination of applying positive and negative pressure on populations
to abandon their former habits and adopt new ones. Positive pressure
consists of providing a technological advantage. However, such
advantages are rarely apparent to consumers before the fact,
especially when such advantages depend critically on well-developed
mass markets and infrastructure (the famous Chicken-and-Egg problem).
E.g., a 1990's vintage high-performance sports car would have been
virtually useless in the year 1890, without superhighways, modern
petroleum refining, trained service technicians, etc. Building the
actual product is only a small part of delivering the full value to
the consumer; an equally important component is engineering society
to enable the product to function.

Thus negative pressure is a legitimate business tactic. As I mentioned
above, the automobile industry applied it in two ways: (1) by selling
enough automobiles to create traffic congestion on then-inadequate
roads, and (2) by directly attacking the competing technologies.
Negative pressure tends to backfire, however, so it can only work when
the latent demand for the new technology is strong enough.

The analogies between the early automobile industry and the early
personal computer industry are obvious. The early products fill
clear-cut specialized needs, but both require massive Social
Engineering to reach their full potential. For automobiles, this meant
freeways, parking, educating/persuading consumers, etc. For computers,
this means high-speed networks, standards compliance, and reducing
legal barriers against the free flow of information. For automobiles,
private industry was unable or unwilling to provide most of the
infrastructure directly, choosing instead to lobby governments to pay
for it out of taxes. Will this tactic be necessary for computers? It
is already in place: consider how much value the publicly-funded
networks are adding to their subsidized users. Even if the government
doesn't pay for infrastructure, it still takes a leading role in the
standards process.

Sooner or later, the computer industry will wake up to the fact that
it is (or should be) competing with personal transportation, just as
the auto industry realized it was competing with urban rail. The auto
industry required about 30 years before it was strong enough to attack
urban rail directly. If the personal computer industry behaves
similarly, we should see such tactics appearing somewhere around the
years 2000--2010. As telecommuting/teleshopping become increasingly
viable, the market for these technologies will benefit from any
deterioration in the alternatives. As computer industries saturate
their existing markets, look for them to start thinking of ways to
undermine the automobile industry. (I can think of plenty, in case
anyone is hiring. :-)

Consumers spend more on personal transportation than all industries
spend to process data; eventually, the computer industries will have
to go for that money.

> Back to computers, I agree with Barry [Shein] that sometime in the 90's
> the information available in electronic form will catch and exceed
> that available on paper,

Right now, it's at about 2% and 98%, respectively. Information in
electronic form has a long, long way to go. One glimmer of hope: most
printed information passes through a computer at some point before
publication.

> Already in the 80's electronic data storage surpassed
> paper in compactness and economy.  

Well now, I'm not so sure that is universally true. If we plot $ (or
cubic meters) per megabyte, certainly electronic media give flatter
slopes, but their Y-intercepts are higher than for paper. For small
amounts of information, paper is still both cheaper (more compact), IF
we include the cost (size) of the computer you need to read the
electronic media. A consumer can walk into a drugstore and buy a
paperback book (~1 MB) for a few dollars. (S)he is already trained to
use the book, so the startup cost is zero. If the same consumer wants
to read the same information off a floppy disk, (s)he needs a computer
that costs at least several hundred dollars (let us ignore for the
moment the high cost of a display with resolution matching that of
paper). What's worse, if (s)he is not trained to use the computer,
then her/his startup cost is very high.

If a person needs to process large quantities of information, then
electronic media are definitely cheaper. But note that paper has all
the incremental advantages initially. This makes it extremely hard to
displace. Even most people who use computers heavily still rely on
huge amounts of paper. (Note: I do not like paper; I consider paper to
measure how the computer industry is not doing its job. I.e., to judge
the real usefulness of a computer system, simply note how much printed
information surrounds it.)

Dan Mocsny
dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu