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Forbes ASAP, August
28, 1995
The
Coming Software Shift
“I
was trying to conceive of how one could approach it in a way that would
be fundamental... like being at the center of a sphere, where there were
opportunities—and problems, of course!—in all directions.”
—Patrick Haggerty of Texas Instruments, explaining his decision to
license the transistor from Bell Labs in 1952
What will it take to launch a new Bill Gates—an Archimedean man who
sharply shifts the center of the sphere, alters the axes of technology
and economy, and builds a new business empire on new foundations? Who
can inherit the imperial throne in the microcosm and telecosm currently
held by the Redmond Rockefeller?
I will open the envelope in a minute. But first I want to tell you about
a new software program called Netscape Navigator Personal Edition. I brought
it back from Silicon Valley in late June and put the package next to my
PC. The PC was proudly running a beta version of Windows 95. I had presented
Windows 95 with great fanfare to my 11-year- old son Richard as his route
to the most thrilling new frontiers of the computer world. Multitasking,
32-bit operation, flat memory! Object linking and embedding! “Information
at your fingertips!” But, all in all, he preferred his Mac Quadra
840AV or even Windows 3.1. They don’t crash so often, he explained.
I live out in the boondocks of western Massachusetts where there are no
convenient full-service connections to the Internet. So I was much less
excited about Netscape than I was about Windows 95. I hoped Windows 95
would put me on line through the Microsoft Network system. Some 10 minutes
later, though, Richard wanted to know my credit card number so I could
choose an Internet service provider. A couple of minutes after that, linked
through internetMCI’s 800 number, Richard was on the World Wide Web,
using the InfoSeek service to examine my chapters from Telecosm on line,
searching the secrets of Sim City 2000 at Maxis, exchanging messages with
Microsoft Flight Simulator buffs, and exploring Disney. As far as I know,
he is still there.
The next thing I knew, my brother Walter came by. He worked for a computer
company, New World Technologies in Ashland, Mass., that builds customized
Pentium machines and delivers them to value-added resellers within 48
hours. Walter wanted the Netscape program. He took it back to my parents’
farm down the road and booted it up on a four-megabyte 386SX Dynatech
previously used to map the pedigrees of a flock of Romney sheep. Soon
he was on the Web scouting out the competition from Dell and Micron and
showing off the Gilder Web page. This intrigued my 77-year-old mother,
who had scarcely even noticed a computer before. I don’t know how
it happened, but before the night was out, she too was on the Web, exploring
catalogs of British colleges for her namesake granddaughter who was soon
to leave for London.
Now let me tell you about my introduction to Java, a new programming language
that menaces Microsoft’s software supremacy. I encountered Java in
early June at a Sun Microsystems conference at the Westin St. Francis
Hotel in downtown San Francisco. For a speech I was to give, I had planned
to use a multimedia presentation, complete with MacroMind Director images
and QuickTime video that I had contrived with an expensive professional
some months earlier. The complexities of Director prompted me to convert
the program to Astound. However, it required an external disk drive and
ran erratically with the eight megabytes of RAM on my Power-Book. I decided
to speak nakedly from notes on the coming technologies of sand and glass
and air.
Following me immediately to the stage was Sun’s amiable chief scientist,
John Gage. He decided to illustrate his speech entirely from the World
Wide Web. He began with a handsome page, contrived minutes before, giving
an account of my speech, headlined: “Gilder Addresses Sun, Tells
of Technologies of Opaque Silicon and Transparent Silicon.” Then
he moved to the Gilder Telecosm archives run by Gordon Jacobson of Portman
Communications at a Web site located at the University of Pennsylvania’s
School of Engineering. Gage illustrated his talk with real- time reports
on traffic conditions in San Diego (where I was about to go), weather
conditions in Florida as a hurricane loomed, and developments on Wall
Street as IBM bid for Lotus. He showed the Nasdaq ticker running across
the screen. He showed animations of relevant charts, cute little Java
gymnasts cartwheeling across the screen, three- dimensional interactive
molecular models and an overflowing coffee cup, entitled “HotJava.”
None of his information and images used a desktop presentation program,
whether from MacroMind or from Microsoft. None of them used a database
engine, whether SQL or Oracular. Indeed, except for the Gilder speech
report, none were created beforehand. Incurring no memory or disk drive
problems, Gage summoned all the illustrations to his PowerBook directly
from the Internet. The animations employed a new computer language, Java,
written for the Web by the venerable Sun programmer James Gosling. Java
allows transmission of executable programs to any computer connected to
the Net to be interpreted and played safely and securely in real time.
Clifford Stoll calls it “Silicon snake oil.” But I call it a
fundamental break in the history of technology. It is the software complement
of the hollowing out of the computer described in Forbes ASAP (“The
Bandwidth Tidal Wave,” December 5, 1994). Almost overnight, the CPU
and its software have become peripheral; the network, central. I had spent
weeks working on a presentation on my desktop computer, using an array
of presentation software. But Gage improvised a more impressive and animated
presentation without using any desktop presentation programs at all. The
World Wide Web and the Java language were enough. Restricted to the files
of my computer, I struggled with storage problems and incompatible research
formats, while he used the storage capacity and information resources
of more than five million host computers on the Net.
Similarly for my family, the limitations of my parents’ barnyard
four-megabyte 386SX didn’t matter. The operating system also didn’t
matter. What was crucial was the network gear and software. My brother
Walter had installed a modem that linked to the Web at an average of 24.6
kilobits per second. With the Netscape Navigator, that was enough. Actually
14.4 would have been enough. Enough to launch a new Bill Gates.
Admit it, the legacy version, once so luminous, is beginning to lose its
shine. You thrill no longer at his vaporware $ 50 million house, fenestrated
with $ 40 billion Windows, offering misty views of Daytona, Memphis, Cairo,
and other far-off places you no longer really care to go, even if—OLE—they
are swimming with GML 3D screen- savers from London’s National Gallery
endlessly hurdling the 640K barrier as if it were flat as a Mac.
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