Chapter 1 - The Future

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The Future	45

business wisdom upside down: give the product away - free - to become the world-wide industry standard, and make money by selling the add-ons.
  By September 1996 40 million people around the world were using the Navigator's simple point-and-click tools to surf the Internet, to find graphics, text and video from vast information databases.
   Chief Executive Officer Jim Barksdale was predicting 500 million users by early in the new century,11 and Bill Gates' team, with its new Internet Explorer, was racing to dominate the same market. By early 1999 Netscape was being merged into an even bigger concept, as part of America Online, which was by then the world's biggest Internet provider.
  Writes Ray Hammond in Digital Business: "What was particularly important about the feeding frenzy for Netscape stock was that the market suddenly grasped the concept of the Internet as a permanent new communications channel, one which will be bigger than all the others put together, a channel which will be, at one and the same time, global, personal, interactive, low cost and forever-growing. However, even these words undersell what the Internet and its successors will become and the impact it will have on business and social structures."
  On its own, says Hammond, a personal computer is fairly dumb. But place it on a network, where it joins millions of others, and "the solitary PC becomes part of a neural network of intelligence which, collectively, has stunning power". Says Nicholas Negroponte, the Founding Director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "Thomas Jefferson advanced the concept of libraries and the right to check out a book free of charge. But this great forefather never considered the likelihood that 20 million people might access a digital library electronically and withdraw its contents at no cost."12
  A CD used as read-only memory (CD-ROM) has a storage capacity of 5 billion bits. That's the equivalent of about 500 classic books "or five years' reading, even for those who read two novels a week".13 Yet by early in the new century, says Negroponte, a typical CD-ROM will be able to hold ten times as much information: the equivalent of 5,000 books.
  A CD-ROM can be mass-produced now for about $1 a disc in the United States and well under 50 cents in China. That's 50 cents for 500 interactive books, soon to be 5,000! And virtually every personal computer is now being delivered with the capacity to play CD-ROMs. Perhaps more importantly, there is now no need even to buy many CD-ROMs themselves. Their interactive contents can be downloaded in-

 

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