This page is part of an in-progress commentary by Roger
Frye
on High Altitude
Thinking: The International Informatics Summit.
Being on the board of an audit commitee is one step below priest and pederast. We have too few targets. Ray Kurzweil introduced himself as just an engineer who enjoyed the art of signal to noise processing. Just what we need now.
Focus on digital technologies that process, present and store information, not telecoms. Look the number and kinds of companies that stood out as examples of excellence.in the beginning. Telecoms were regulated. Deregulation is a near imposible task. Airlines started 20 years ago.
David Packard was testifying in Congress on how to measure excellence in business -- profit. Profit is nothing less than the privelege that the customer lets you take away for a service provided. Need a clear profit proposition. Telecoms banned from profit. Diverted vast resources to doomed analog when digital was needed.
In the first postwar period, IBM dominated large and small. .... Microprocessors, graphics quality, mobility. Pay $100 for each ounce in weight removed from a cell phone. hardware then software then wireless... These are not profit propositions, just technological innovations.
Amazon, yahoo, google, napster suggest that new value propositions are out there. Look at web portals and search engines. Things happened so fast that there was no time to measure whether they had valuable propositions.
What signals are significant: graphics quality and mobility represent essential human factors.
Global networking: Need order and predictability for ease of use. Extracting more value from computational agents. Robustness of access. Access to the web that degrades gradually. Redundancy.
Question: what is the status of white house approach to technology advisement (as he did to Reagan). Answer: technology policy is rudimentary. They understand the importance of broadband and the need for a role.
Taylor question: how large companies looking for relationships with small companies and relationship to railroads. Answer: big companies don't know how. When Microsoft surpassed IBM in market capitalization. Nowadays ideas are coming from 2 people in a garage. Many failures. Venture cpialista are broke and disgraced. Will see huge consolidation in computer industry.
END