by Clifford Stoll
February 27, 1995


After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connections, try again later."

Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:
Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames—but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I'll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

 

Heh. That's funny. I've got another one for you ...

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.p...40&cid=2467504

That asshat proclaimed the iPod wouldn't do well. Apple sure showed him!

In my defense the four points I made were corrected the next year. They released iTunes for Windows, switched it to USB, and dropped the price by $150. Now you can get a brand new iPod for $50. The first year of the iPod was dismal, but after they improved the available audience the sales went through the roof. It also went from a music only device with a terrible interface to where it is now - an all inclusive media device, including web!, with a pretty great interface.

The same is true for internet usage. Initially it was expensive, difficult, and frustrating to be a member of the Information Super Highway and there really wasn't much going on anyway. Now you can be online without even realizing it and there's a lot more to do.

 

The one bit of technology that always gets me is the iPhone and that whole "there is a apps for that". There is now a app for a total paperless airline e-ticket. Some airlines will send your ticket to the iPhone complete with bar code and everything for boarding. Somewhere in the process you just scan your iPhone.

The amusing part to me is this. I just recently flew out of PDX and had a ticket I printed. At the security line the guy with no emotion wrote in highlighter all over my ticket. I can see the same guy marking up somebodies iPhone screen.

I also work for a major carrier of data,voice, video. Several years ago the big thing was OC192 rate (10 gig per second) bandwidth. This year it is OC768 (40 gig per second), and in the very near future is 100 gig per second.

 

wanna run one of those to my house, plz?

 

^^^ Paul brings up a great point -

What is the difference in Sony and Apple?

Apple changed to meet the consumer where Sony has tried to force the consumer to change and meet them.

Let's look back at Sony's history of proprietary devices.

Beta – the last outlet for Sony Beta went away when TV crews switched to digital – yes until just a few years ago, all news broadcast were done via Beta tapes. The Adult film industry killed this one for Sony – once they picked VHS, it was a done deal.

CD – not a competing format but a grea

Minidisk – did anyone buy one of these things?

Memory stick – they are still sticking with this one for some reason

Blueray – This one came as a complete surprise to me. After Sony’s track record I was betting against them.

 

don't forget UMD for the playstation portable. It died not long after it's intro (i think minidisk lasted longer)
I think one reason why BR succeeded is because of the PS3. At the time the ps3 came out, HD-DVD and BR players were $600 - $1k+. The ps3 was running 400 so it was a video game machine riding on the populary of the PS2 ADDED to a cheap hd video player.

 

Interesting... I'm afraid Clifford was lagging even as he wrote that piece.

By 1995 I had worked with more than one major corporation that had instituted regular business meetings and functional workgroups using conference calls, email, and shared network resources. Travel and face to face meetings were an exception not a norm.

And today even my 88yo mother would rather have a kindle book than a paper book and wonders why she can't check-out from an online library instead of having to drive to an expensive building to borrow a paper edition.

But you don't have to look too far back to see when phones and televisions were not common in most homes.

 

Fast forward to now...

I was reading on Yahoo today where Verizon and AT&T will stop printing the paper directory in selected states pending FCC approval. We have evolved to a cellphone society and rely so much on the internet it is fast to look up numbers online.

Over the several years people have been dumping their home POTS line and going cell phone only. Now we wait for the next "big" beyond the cell phone.

Technology is changing crazy fast.