‘We are destined to go through chaos’

Using events in the history of communication as his guide, Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s vice president of advanced technology and business development, mapped out a path that he believes will lead us into the digital world as he began the closing session of Digital World ‘92.

Printing presses, photocopy machines and desktop publishing technology revolutionized the dissemination of information. The next landmark technology, according to Myhrvold, will be digital media. It will, he says, incite an information revolution greater, perhaps, than all save Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press.

WITH DIGITAL, AUTHORS ARE EVERYWHERE

“[With the advent of this digital world], we are saying let’s use digital technology and electronic distribution, either directly on line, via servers or stored media, to fundamentally change the way video and audio and text — all forms of information — are stored,” Myhrvold, says. “Part of the message here is that authors are everywhere.”

So far, so good. Other than the potential for lots of really horrible multimedia everywhere you look, people like the idea that this technology empowers individuals to become creators of content that is no longer destined for their eyes only. Myhrvold’s vision promises a future where people can access and distribute more media than is currently available through the television networks, cables companies, and media publishers.

Discussed at this high level, we all get the warm-and-fuzzies about “converging technologies.” Individuals from the telephone and cable companies, the entertainment, computer and consumer electronics industries can actually see a future where “we cooperate to compete.” It’s when we try to figure out how to get
to that digital utopia from here that causes indigestion and territorial marking en masse.

The pecking order. “It is clear that we can’t all be right,” he said, noting that for two and a half days, speakers from each of the “converging” industries provided Digital World attendees with their version of the future, which inevitably put their particular company, or industry, in the driver seat.

“Any actionable, concrete suggestions that came out of the presentations were almost always contradictory to the concrete suggestions made by someone else,” says Myhrvold. “Now in a way that is something we should expect, because these are industries feeling their way. But I think there is also going to be a substantial realignment.” And not everyone will be happy with their position in the pecking order.

Probably a lot of smoke, actually. “We will see personal computers, information providers, consumer electronics and telecommunications coming together,” he says. “But this is not necessarily the happy picture some would paint. This is also the clash of the industries, because in the natural process of deciding which of these fundamental assumptions is right and wrong, which need to be adjusted and which don’t, we are going to see a lot of heat, light and smoke generated.”

BIRTH PAINS COME IN WAVES

All this angst, philosophizing and posturing, he says, is really no different than the stages that companies had to move through during the beginnings of the personal computer industry, and, for that matter, the birth of publishing. Like any birthing process, the pains come in waves.

“The first wave [of the digital world] is already with us,” says Myhrvold. “Digital technology such as CD audio has transformed parts of the entertainment and consumer electronics businesses. We are now entering the second wave, making dedicated systems such as PDAs and dedicated multimedia players and proud of it.”

But, he warns, we should look to the past and remember the ballyhoo that surrounded the arrival of dedicated word processors in the early days of the computer revolution. We must ask ourselves, he says, where those 50 different dedicated systems are now, and be prepared for a future that is nothing like we have imagined it.

Janice Maloney