The Wired World - will it catch on?
My wife and I rented a couple of movies last night. The first time in months that it hasn't been our two sons that have done the renting - and they usually pick video games. The occaision was that our sons were away for a long weekend at their Grandmother's and we actually had some time to spend together.
I found it interesting that Michael Scott's column in the Vancouver Sun weekend "Saturday Review" (October 1, 1994) was on multimedia, a subject near and dear to my heart. I couldn't find a copy of the article he was commenting on from The Economist by Peter Haynes, but he quoted enough that the reader could grasp the main idea that wonderful things lie ahead for the consumer, but the industry being spawned to deliver them will have a lot of hard times unless they recognize that the consumer won't change their habits easily or quickly.
The concept of giving the consumer the ability to shop and choose entertainment from their couch is all well and good, but it ignores the fact that the consumer has had thousands of years of community living and still craves human contact outside of the immediate family - maybe especially outside of the immediate family! Yes, in some instances people will welcome the immediate availability the technology offers. But will they do so often enough or in great enough numbers to pay for the infrastructure needed to provide these services?
Over the past years I have watched the technology of communications march towards the type of extended wired society that science fiction writers have been writing about for decades. In some stories - culminating perhaps with Isaac Asimov in his The Naked Sun, humans have at last completely divorced themselves from direct interpersonal contact - prefering instead to `view' each other through real time 3D communications. I'm not sure we will ever get to that extreme, but if we do you can bet that someone the likes of the phone company or the cable company will be the one who sold the idea just so they could boost their revenues a bit more from the increased communications facilities needed.
But the evolution of our lives to that point won't happen overnight despite the best efforts of the communications industry. People have a fair amount of inertia against changes in their basic life style. They like going shopping, even if they don't like buying; they like interacting with people, even if they are afraid to go out at night; they don't want to sit in front of their TVs or computers all the time no matter how easy you make it for them to do so.
Sure, if you give them the ability to order movies from the comfort of their home they will try it and report that they like it. But when you ask them to pay the same amount they would pay at the video rental store (or more) for this priviledge and throw in the inability to stop/start/rewind/review they will continue to go to their various neighbourhood video stores to get their movies. People simply are more comfortable with the store paradigm than they are with the interactive video one. Even if you tell them that the wear and tear on their car, the gas, the polution, the chance of mugging, etc all cost them more in the long run, they still will insist on visiting the store because it is familiar. Changing these habits is what will cost the communications industry.
I have the feeling that the coming commercial version of the `Digial Superhighway' will be an incredibly costly venture for the companies trying not only to pave it, but to get us to use it. I don't think the general consumer will change their habits quickly enough to use the services offered nearly as much as the industry hopes, and certainly not enough to justify the billions being spent on it or to pay those billions back in any reasonable time. Watch for the cost of your other basic services to go up just to cover this dramatic flow of red ink. All of the players in this new arena are already supplying things that are considered necessities to people: cablevision, local and long distance telephone, newspapers and magazines, movies, videos, records, etc. The cost of these services plays so much role in the overall cost of living that an increase in them will probably be seen as simply inflation.
The captains of these industries have such a hold on their respective arenas that even if they bleed billions they really won't suffer, only the general consumer of their current services will suffer, through increased prices or decreased quality or both. So the consumer is funding the creation of something that the consumer has little likelyhood of using enough to justify.
I don't want to sound as if I think the wired home revolution is a bad thing. I think it is one of the most exciting outcomes of the experiment that has become the Internet. My concern is that the compound growth figures that have been typical of the Internet's recent history are now getting into pretty huge real numbers. A million new users a month is scary! And it is this million new users a month that has the business interests foaming at the mouth over the potential for profit. My other concern is that instead of recognizing the potential of the current Internet paradigm, these businesses want to create their own massive infrastructure and paradigm. The "Not Invented Here" disease still runs rampent.
IBM for instance, is just about to launch its IBM Global Network. Microsoft has voiced plans of their own such network. DEC on the other hand seems to have embraced the Internet whole heartedly. The cable TV companies seem bent on creating a monster with their CableLabs consortium. These are only the ones that come easily to mind but there are others, and it seems that the hottest new stock schemes are about capturing this "new" market.
We already have several competing standards for such things from the likes of America Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve. We can only hope that the integration of the newer networks goes better than has that of the older ones. The last thing the consumer needs is another war like that between Beta and VHS for the video recorder. We already have minor skirmishes between the BBS unicentric paradigm and the Internet global paradigm. I think that the global paradigm will win out, with the BBSs simply becoming stoping places rather than destinations.
I just hope that with all the new entertainment and communication options opening up in the future the industry will realize that I still like to get out of the house and interact with people and real environments. I won't be spending as much of my time and hard earned money on their cyber-environments as they might like me to.
Richard Pitt
richard@wimsey.com
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