INTERVIEW:
Question 1
There is a lot of talk about personalized information. There are different ways to
personalize information. One way is to personalize information around local realities,
their regional cultures, another possibility is to customize the information with regards
to different kinds of administration, political issues and also on different social
levels, of the economy, the issue of those who have and those who have not. What is your
opinion?
Answer
Many people want to have customized information, but when they try to define what they
need, they're not very good at it. Most of us are willing to take the same thing that lots
of other people do. Lots of people read the same newspaper. And if you don't want one
newspaper, you go to another newspaper, but you don't try to talk to the writer yourself.
So you can overstate how much is customized. Second. most of us say we don't care about
everything. But if you want to be a well-rounded person and be able to go home and talk to
your spouse or go to work and talk to your co-workers, you do have to know certain things
that are going on in the world, even though you didn't think you needed to know then. And
that's why you watch mass-market television, listen to mass-market radio or read
mass-market newspapers. Somebody's decided what's in your interest. You go and do it, you
go and listen to it, you watch it and you're a more well-rounded person because of it.
Question 2
Where do you think the most interesting issue will come from? There are different players.
There are large companies with regards to infrastructure and technology and and smaller
companies with regard to application. What is your opinion ? How do we look in different
directions for the things to come?
Answer
The content, what you see, what you hear, what you read, comes from small companies. It is
not capital-intensive - one person can write a script, one actor can be the star in a
movie or in a play or on the radio. You don't need lots of infrastructure to produce
content and, in fact, big companies have shown they really don't know how to produce
content. On the other hand, distribution is where there are long lead times, lots of
capital required, government intervention, technological risks and the inability to
distinguish one delivery device from another. That's where the big companies come in,
that's where all the investment is and I think that's where all the great losses will come
because in the end, you won't care how you get your information. In fact, the computer
that you put it on or the television set that shows it to you is not going to tell you
whether it got there from the phone line, got there from the cable, got there from
satellite or got there over the air. The distribution part is capital-intensive but not
attractive and attracts big companies. The creative part is unattractive for capital but
very attractive for individuals and so it tends to be small companies. And I think that's
where all the money will be made down the road.
Question 3
Talking about the differences between the different cultures, European culture and
American culture, how do you see the evolution of these new technologies and this new
content being differentiated between say the United States and Europe ?
Answer
The technology really is transferable. It doesn't matter whether you get your television
signal over a television made on the other side of the world or made in your home town.
The content, on the other hand, is local and that's why you have local reporters and you
have movies made for the local market and why the newspapers are published locally. It's
not just the difference in language, it is a difference of culture and cultures are very
hard to understand from far away. So I don't think that people who work locally will ever
have to worry about being put out of work by somebody internationally. On the other hand,
the technology that you buy, there is nothing magical about it being made in your home
town. If it's made on the other side of the world, it works just as well. Take a look when
you see people walking down the street with a cellular phone to their ear, you don't know
where that cellular phone was made. You probably don't even know the name of the company
that made that cellular phone. But it is local language and a local person you're probably
talking to on your cellular phone.
Question 4
Do you see a difference in attitude towards what has been promised by the use of the new
technology in Europe compared to the United States?. Do you see in Europe some kind of
fear with regards to losing traditional values, whereas in the United States there is more
freedom to go ahead and jump?
Answer
There's always a fear of losing your own culture. America is a very big country, 250
million people, 3000 miles wide, so we have a great fear of losing our culture, but you
don't notice it because it's so big it doesn't happen very often. You can read in the
papers about let's say in France where a lot of people feel that English is taking over in
France and people are using the French language less. I don't think Americans feel
differently about that. There's clearly in America a feeling that people want to keep
English as the national language, the same feeling that the French have about keeping
French their national language. The only difference is the size of America makes it more
difficult, it takes a longer time before you lose your native language and other cultures
come in. Having said all that, people while they're very different and come from very
different parts of the world and think differently, some things they all have in common.
"Baywatch" 250 million people a week watch. That's something that goes across
cultures, McDonald's hamburgers go across culture, television goes across culture,
cellular phones. You see more cellular phones in peoples' hands on the streets of Europe
that you have ever seen in the United States. It is noticeable how much more people walk
around here with a cellular phone than they do in America. So I don't think that there is
any... Europe has its fears and America has its fears. Both continents are very receptive
to new ideas, and in fact even if you look in the Third World, you can go to most of the
Third World and they may not have electricity, they may live in mud huts, but the village
has a generator and a TV and a VCR and a satellite dish and they're watching television
from around the world coming into them and when you see pictures of terrorists in the
mountains of eastern Europe, they all have cellular phones in their hands, and lots of
them have global positioning satellite receivers. People will adopt technology when it
comes in a form that is easy for them to accept, because it mimics what they've been doing
and when there is great need. And if it's difficult to use or there's no great need, all
the advertising in the world is not going to force them to take it.
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