|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 Upside, April 30, 1994 Interview with George Gilder (Page 1 of 4) By Eric Nee George Gilder is one of the few real futurists in high technology. Most of those who call themselves futurists do little more than paste together the latest fads and press clippings into a few good sound bites. But Gilder is different. He immerses himself in the technology by learning the underlying science, and gets out and talks to the people involved, ranging from engineers in the labs to entrepreneurs forming new companies. R As a result, Gilder is that rare visionary capable of developing cogent general theories to explain where new technologies are moving. His first effort was the book Microcosm, (Simon and Shuster, 1989), which looked at semiconductors. His current passion is communications, which he has written about in Life After Television (Norton, 1994) and in a series of articles in Forbes ASAP. Gilder will advance his ideas further in the forthcoming book Telecosm, (Simon and Shuster, 1995). R While Gilder looks toward the future, he remains firmly rooted in the past. He lives with his wife, three daughters and son in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. His house in the small town of Tyringham is a childhood residence. Ironically, while Gilder is immersed in the theory of high-bandwidth networks, he is not likely to use one at home soon. No company has deemed it profitable to run a cable line past his home, let alone a fiber-optic line. Gilder is going to be stuck with a low-bandwidth telephone line for quite some time. UPSIDE: What do you think about interactive TV? Is it an oxymoron? GILDER: Interactivity is a PC function, not a TV function. I've been writing a lot about the death of television, and I think it's more likely today than before. A lot of the stuff about HDTV and interactive TV and settop box TV is all just hype. The really interactive information superhighway systems will be spearheaded by networked personal computers. As soon as the cable systems become accessible by computer users, it is going to radically change the industry. When you have a 6-Mhz cable channel to tie to your computer, you change the whole nature of the computer. And PCs themselves are getting more powerful. What is happening is the combination of what I've called the Law of the Microcosm, which can essentially be summed up by saying you take any number N of transistors and put them on a single sliver of silicon and you get N-squared performance. You get all kinds of exponential improvements in performance as you make the transistors smaller and put them closer together. But I also think there's another exponential in play, and I call it the Law of the Telecosm. You take any number N of computers and tie them together in networks, and you get N-squared performance. This also is Metcalfe's Law, because Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, made a similar point. What you have now are these two exponentials working together. The exponential rise in the performance of the silicon, plus the exponential rise in the productivity of computers interlinked in networks. Each additional computer uses the network as a resource, but it is also potentially a resource for the network. So you get this steady increase in capabilities that derives from the expansion of the network itself. An example of that would be the Internet. Yes. As opposed to a TV network. Each additional TV is not a resource for the other TVs. The telephone network is more like a computer network because the more people who have telephones, the more valuable the telephone network is. But it's not the kind of exponential benefits you get from computers. Each additional computer is also a potential switch, a potential database. That is why the combination of personal computers and net- works is going to blow away the TV and telephone industries in their current form. Those industries will succeed only to the extent that they become suppliers and conduits for the computer industry. Aren't settop boxes starting to resemble computers? I don't think so. First of all, they begin with the assumption that the settop box will have to meet the form factors and price points of consumer electronics. It's got to be a $200 or $300 box. That means it's got to be hard wired and only marginally programmable. It's going to be hard to get even the limited functions people want, which include a lot of interactivity, superimposing graphic materials on existing programming, reproduction of VCR capabilities and a lot of windowing. It's a difficult set of targets this little $200 or $300 machine has to hit. And it's unlikely they [manufacturers] will target those functions just right. Or they may be defined just right for the moment the thing's launched, but within six months or so there is going to be some other function that becomes real important that they had not planned on. But the PC can evolve. Every 18 months the cost-effectiveness of the PC doubles. The PC buyer is accustomed to paying $1,500 or so for the machine and another $1,500 worth of software and peripherals. There is no restriction to a $200 or $300 price point. And the capability of the machine is increasing enormously. People use the PC to increase their own productivity, wealth and learning. It's a positive force in their lives. This combination of the Law of the Microcosm and the Law of the Telecosm, plus this cultural force, the domonetics of the PC, means it is the vehicle for the Information Age and the information superhighway. The effort to adapt the TV to it in various ways is probably going to fail. When you really look across the landscape of the last several years, at various experiments, initiatives and developments, you find that most of the ones associated with interactive television have failed. Meanwhile you get these phenomenal upside surprises in the PC world. You get this 40 percent unexpected increase in PC sales in 1993 at a time when some analysts were actually expecting a decrease. You get this huge increase in networking, the rise in the use of the Internet. The explosive development of CD-ROMs in the PC and multimedia world. The one upside surprise that I have to recognize, and I have probably not attended to enough, is home shopping on TV. But my belief is that home shopping, as it becomes more sophisticated, is going to become more suited to a PC environment. One of the keys is that to sell a really important product you are going to need quite a bit of text. And that text is going to have to be under the control of the user. People will want detailed information before they commit to buying. |
||||
|
Gildertech.com © 2000 Gilder Technology Group. All rights reserved. |
