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Forbes ASAP, February 27, 1995
Gilder
Meets His Critics
The “Critics” comments in this article and the response by George
Gilder, provides third party opinions and analysis that has not heretofore
been available in the long running Telecosm Series.
The letters from Mr. Gilder’s critics have posted without the express
permission of each of their respective authors. The postings have been
made under the doctorine of “Fair Use.” If any author wishes
to have his letter deleted, an Email message to such effect, addressed
to webmaster@gilder.com, containing a reply address and/or telephone
number will initiate a dialog.
Right after
George Gilder took on feisty Tom Peters in the Battle of City vs. Country,
we struck a low blow: We gave the exhausted futurist a mountain of mail
he had to read and answer, quick. Here, we print a sampling of the responses
to Gilder’s piece the onrush of bandwidth (Forbes ASAP, Dec. 5);
a letter from Steven Dorfman of GM Hughes about an earlier article (Oct.
10); and Gilder’s answers to all.
Thanks, George! {Editors, ASAP}
Nicholas Negroponte
Director, MIT Media Laboratory, Boston,
MA
Debunking Bandwidth:
When our world is fibered, the planet is like a desktop. Earth is but
a backplane for a single computer. True. But as mere humans, the bandwidth
we’re really interested in is the one that exists between us and
computers, be they the size of a cuff link or a country. That bandwidth
is often one we want to be smaller, not bigger. Most of us, most of the
time, want less bits, not more bits. Sure we want gigabits, but only for
a few millionths of a second at a time.
Remember the early days of computing when stacks of fanfolded output were
dropped on an executive’s desk? People caught on quickly; that was
data, not information. Today, for some reason, we have forgotten some
simple concepts about what constitutes meaning and understanding and where
they come from. You. So while it is real easy to ship vast amounts of
data and high-resolution images back and forth between computers and while
it is suddenly possible to ignore geographic constraints, let’s not
forget that in many cases “less is more” when it comes to bandwidth.
Narrow channels force us to be smarter. Yes, bandwidth will be free, but
so will computing. The future will not be driven by either MIPS or BPS,
but information and entertainment content. Andy Grove does not need to
worry about John Malone or Bill Gates. He has to worry about Michael Ovitz.
Mark
Stahlman
President, New Media Associates, New York, NY
Bandwidth to Burn: Now What Do We Do?
Gilder has made a case for vastly expanded bandwidth overwhelming the
influence of the steady march of computing power. [But] what new need
will drive businesses to translate the inventions Gilder describes into
significant new media opportunities?
Apparently, it’s the need for video-on-demand. [But] if this were
a plausible mass market, the streets of New York would be filled with
bicycle messengers delivering Tom Cruise with bags of Chinese food. No,
during the next five to 10 years, bandwidth will certainly be consumed
in much greater quantities—but for completely different reasons.
We will dramatically extend ourselves and our social relationships with
video-telephones. We will consume substantial bandwidth by substituting
bandwidth for gasoline—through telecommuting. We will network to
multimedia databases (such as the current Internet-based World Wide Web)
and dramatically expand our range of social contacts—across borders,
cultures and tribes.
Unfortunately for Gilder’s bandwidth braggarts, these enormous markets
will be built using a telecommunications technology which began deployment
over 10 years ago—ISDN—and in which none of them has any important
financial stake today. Unglamorous, ungainly, even downright ugly, ISDN
(integrated services digital network) will be supplied by old-time telephone
companies (not cable companies) and it will be driven by the steady progress
of personal computers—themselves now a 15- to 20- year-old industry.
As has been widely noted, we tend to overestimate (sometimes dramatically)
the near-term impact of new technologies and underestimate the long-range
effects.
In this age, new technology hype has become an epidemic. Reality itself,
as it turns out, is far more interesting.
Michael
Slater
President,
MicroDesign Resources, and Editorial Director, Microprocessor Report,
Sebastopol, CA
Increasing bandwidth will provide computers with more information to process,
and this will increase, not decrease, the computational requirements.
Having high bandwidth makes it possible for the interface nodes to be
less intelligent, but this is not necessarily desirable. Furthermore,
the time frame must be considered; high-bandwidth WAN (wide area network)
connections are not going to be widely available for years, and in the
meantime, computational power will continue to be critical as a way to
mitigate bandwidth limitations.
No matter how much bandwidth is available, it is still very desirable
to have high-performance computational ability in desktop systems. Rendering
of three-dimensional images from mathematical representations, for example,
is something that has widespread application not only in games, but in
other consumer applications (like home and garden design programs). Orders
of magnitude more performance will result in direct improvements in such
applications, and bandwidth is no substitute here.
Finally, with regard to the inclusion of signal-processing capabilities
in general-purpose microprocessors, I disagree with Gilder’s conclusion
that this will not occur. Minor extensions to general-purpose architectures,
such as the ability to perform four 8-bit additions in parallel using
the same hardware that normally performs a single 32-bit addition, will
provide a significant boost for applications such as video decompression.
The cost of adding these features is small, and the benefit is great.
Sun and HP have already made such additions to their processors, and I
expect Intel and other x86 vendors will do so in the future. Dedicated
DSPs will always be able to provide higher performance, but the incremental
cost/performance of adding functions to the host CPU is superior.
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