jls@world.std.com
If 1979 marked the beginning of the PC industry, when will it become commonplace to walk into the average office and see the Internet totally integrated into that workplace (where it's used not only for E-mail transfer but also for joining in on forums or accessing on-line information)? Where is that point? How far out? Ten years? Twenty? What will it look like? How far have we come? Where are we today? How far do we have to go?
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
The answer to that question is a book. The distance we have come can be measured by Gordon Moore's law, which says we double complexity on a chip every 18 months. He has been right for over 20 years and is likely to continue being right. His partner at Intel, Andy Grove, is fond of pointing out that 50% of the world's computing power was manufactured in the last 2 years. What Andy fails to mention is that, rightly or wrongly, a lot of the new computers are turned off most of the time.
I prefer to look at the question in terms of the human interface, which was sensory deprived in 1979. Today it is much richer. Curiously, it is asymmetrically richer in that the output side of the equation is filled with sound, color, animation, video, etc. By contrast, the input side is sterile. It is a mouse! That will need to change soon, and it will.
jls@world.std.com
You talk to a lot of CEOs and see a lot of companies. What's your opinion of MIS departments?
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
MIS departments are usually out-of-date organizations that spend most of their time justifying themselves. They are about as relevant as audiovisual departments. With so much on the desktop, there is less need for centralized MIS.
Subject: The Personal and the Professional
jls@world.std.com
You mentioned that your notebook is the single invention that's had a positive effect on you in the past several years. Is there some gadget or piece of technology that has had a similar impact on your personal life? Something you think of now and wonder how you functioned effectively without it before?
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
My notebook IS my personal life. The act of being digital has many features, but one of the most important is the better blend of the personal and the professional. There is no better luxury. What would have been your answer?
jls@world.std.com
Voice mail and fax machines are the two things that have had the biggest impact on my personal and professional life, probably for some of the same reasons your notebook counts among your favorites.
You mentioned in your last message "the better blend of the personal and the professional." Can you say more about how you've reached that balance over the past several years? How has technology played into your ability to reach that balance?
Where are you in France? Business or pleasure? I mentioned to my wife that I thought you might be taking a holiday break from work, and she said: "Let me get this straight, he's taking a vacation to get away from Patmos?" I told her it must be business.
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
I am in the Loire for a few more hours and go to London tomorrow morning. Assure your wife that one can need a vacation from Patmos. I am afraid it was filled with tragedy this year, involving not me or my family, but close friends, the details of which I will not bother you with. But when work and play are so deeply commingled, sometimes it is indeed necessary to get out of paradise.
It used to be the case that only tycoons like Rupert Murdoch and the like could close deals on their yachts. But we more normal folk can now emulate those work styles in a small way, as long as you are not a brain surgeon, for example, who needs to be near the operating theater. Journalists, like you, can mix and match. Look, you are interviewing me on Sunday (across the Atlantic). I hear (from my wife) that the weather is foul there; it is just fine here.
It is not just the technology that has allowed this to happen. I have been on the Internet for a quarter of a century. Before laptops there were terminals. What makes the difference is the lifestyle of your circle of acquaintances, not just your own equipment and connectedness. It happens that most of the people with whom I do business are on-line. Now I even make it a condition! One to which you have agreed -- in fact, one you suggested!
jls@world.std.com
I'm very sorry to hear about the misfortune that hit your friends in Patmos. I'm glad you're able to get away from work and the book (I assume) to enjoy France and England.
Are there instances when you've found technology actually gets in the way of blending the personal and the professional? That it becomes an obstacle?
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
That happens more often to me in Boston when the phone rings as we are sitting down to dinner and some jerk is selling something (my language turns embarrassingly foul). It happens less in Patmos or the Loire, because the technology is enabled when I feel like it. You did not interrupt me today, on Sunday, with your E-mail. I am waiting for somebody who is about to come over, and I said to myself, "Might as well log in." I am sure that a doctor on call finds his or her beeper much more invasive.
