High-tech revolution makes way for high-tech evolution—Part I

Oh sure, new - evolutionary - advances will continue to be made in every
field. Disk drives will store more data per square inch, silicon chips will pack
ever more transistors and microprocessors will get faster and faster. And new
Silicon Valley companies will rise to become multi-billion dollar enterprises.

But like the landing on the Moon, which signified the highest of all human
achievements before and since, the high-tech revolution has reach its summit
point from which, further advancement will only be gradual at best. Much like
the Space Shuttle is a much better vehicle than the Lunar Module, better
cellular phones will come along, better video games, better personal computers,
PDAs, cameras, MP3 players and anything else digital.

But in terms of bringing new life- and business-changing advances into our
lives, there is currently nothing on the Silicon Valley technology radar that
could have as vast an impact as personal computers, cellular phone, the
Internet, digital cameras, and all the other electronic tools and gadgets
currently available for consumers and business users.

Digital convenience all around

As consumers, virtually every imaginable product envisioned in the 1970s and
1980s when the digital revolution started to take shape, is now available at
very reasonable prices.

Let's take a brief inventory of some of this digital convenience:



Communications: Cellular telephones can now double as personal digital
assistants and give us access to our email and voicemail alike from just about
anywhere. And the first cell phones with video capability have already been
demonstrated. Soon they will probably take pictures as well - still and video --
which can be sent instantly to anyone, anywhere. But that kind of integration is
simply a higher level of application, not a new revolution.

Life recording: Digital still cameras such as the new Sony Mavica can
store up to 1,000 high-resolution images on 3.5-inch disks. A single disk,
costing less than 50 cents, holds the capacity of 40+ regular rolls of Kodak
film. There are no development costs and any consumer can make prints that rival
print shop quality with a $200 to $300 color printer. Around the corner are
digital cameras that hook up to your cell phone and let you broadcast an event,
like a wedding ceremony, over the Internet to a distant or bed-ridden family
member.

Google knows more than God! The Internet, after shedding the doomed
get-rich-quick dot-com schemers, and with the help of companies like Google, has
evolved into an all-knowing worldwide information center. Google can locate any
bit of data ever published online or any person ever written about or listed in
a flash of a second. It recently took all but 10 seconds to locate an elementary
schoolmate I lost contact with 35 years ago because he was listed in the
newsletter of his church half way around the world.

Someone with a vacation home can now list the house on any of a dozen online
vacation rental Web sites. The ads, which cost less than $100 per year, can
generate from $2,000 to $8,000 in monthly rental income. The Internet has given
ordinary people an avenue of marketing to the entire world at little or no cost.
You can't envision much more personal power than that.

Home entertainment: Large 60x30-inch panoramic HDTVs provide a picture
quality from which there is virtually no imaginable improvement. Coupled with an
advanced audio system you can enjoy a DVD movie more so than in a real theater.
DVD recorders will further enhance consumers' ability to enjoy their HDTV
systems by being able to record digital programs and playing them back when
convenient.

On the same consumer electronic level, you can now put 200 full-length music
CDs onto a Sony Discman-size player that holds 10 or more gigabytes of data.
Most people don't have 200 music CDs. You can also record hundreds of hours
worth of you favorite tunes in MP3 format, copy the files to a CD-ROM and play
them back in hi-fi audio during a long flight or while jogging.

Digital convenience: Digital convenience is popping up everywhere around
us. Supermarkets can automatically scan the products you've put in the shopping
cart and charge your ATM checking account without going through a cash register.
I can buy movie and concert tickets at my bank ATM.

Person productivity: Fully-loaded personal computers operating at 2
billion calculations per second can now be purchased for under $1,000. That will
seem slow two or three years from now. But there is no software available today
that would require a whole lot more processing power to be achieve any
significant gains in personal productivity. With a DSL or cable modem access to
the Internet, people can work from home virtually as easily and productively as
from their office, which usually feature much slower desktop computers than seen
in most homes.

To be continued…