INTERVIEW:
Question 1
In the past communication was centred around the telephone and old telephony applications.
Today something is changing. The telephone itself is changing, moving into something that
is no longer analogical. And we have Internet. What is your point of view?
Answer
The Internet is really an outgrowth of the transformation that has occurred in the
telephone system over the last 20 years. In the past 20 years telephone communication has
become data-oriented. When you make a long distance call to the United States, for
example, all of the voice is carried as data over the telephone lines and this has been
made possible by fibre optic cables. But these fibre optic cables have 100,000 times the
amount of bandwidth or the capacity that is required for voice, so they have much more
capability than is needed for just voice. As a result people began to use or licence, some
of this excess capacity from the telephone companies to enable carrying data. This is how
the Internet was born: the Internet became a system for transmitting data on the telephone
lines. The interesting thing is that the voice system as we know it, which was built to be
a voice communications system, is now becoming a data communications system. But data is
much more general than voice, so data includes things like images and text, electronic
mail and moving images and audio and all of these what are called multimedia, so the
multimedia communications system of the future is the Internet. In the next five to ten
years even the Internet will carry interactive video and you will be able to watch a movie
or other kinds of entertainment over the Internet. I believe you will also use it for
voice communication.
Question 2
Until a few years ago there was a lot of talk about interactive television. Now with the
availability of a broader band on the traditional connections interactive television is
being proposed with the Internet. What is your opinion?
Answer
In the US the cable television industry touches about 65 million homes, about 65 % of the
total number of homes. The cable going into the home has been used to carry analogue
television, but something is occurring now. The cable television companies that own these
cables into the home, are beginning to alter what is transmitted on the cable to make some
part of it data, and on this part they are going to make Internet services available. The
US has a much larger installed base, a much larger population of people who have cable TV
in their home, but this cable TV channel or system is able to deliver data at a very high
rate, so there is the capability to connect a personal computer to the cable and to
receive data. The personal computer will be able to connect through a modem to receive
data through the cable television system and the data communication rate or the rate at
which the personal computer is able to get this data is very much higher than the rate
that can be received through the conventional telephone. As a result, I think a lot of
people will be adopting the personal computer, communicating through the cable television
system to receive the Internet. This will mean much more interesting media, much more
interesting audio and other kinds of interactive media, such as would be found on a
CD-ROM. This is the kind of transformation that is just beginning to occur. If you go
another five years beyond that, you can see this system becoming even bigger and being
able to deliver movies on demand. I believe video-on-demand and interactive television
will come through this system.
Question 3
Some recent studies have shown that Europe was more ready than the United States to jump
on interactive television because, while in the Unites States there was cable TV, the PC
and the traditional broadcasting industry, in Europe the PC industry was not so large as
in the United States. So everything was concentrated on telecommunicationsand
broadcasting. Where do you see the role of Europe in this evolution of interactive
television today?
Answer
There are two different ways that people will interact with media, I think. One is through
a consumer device such as the television of the future and the other is through their PC.
In some countries there is a very large installed base of PCs. In some countries there is
not such a large installed base of PCs, but there is a large installed base of
televisions. I believe the television of the future will have the ability to interface
with the Internet. I know some companies preparing televisions that have the ability to
retrieve from the Internet, the World Wide Web (WWW). I think this will be the main way in
which the ordinary consumer interacts with the Internet. But the PC will continue to be a
home device as well as a professional business device and the PC will also retrieve
television programming and so forth from the network. I think you will have these two
kinds of devices and they will both exist for the ordinary consumer who doesn't have a
computer. The professionals may decide that they want to interact with the network through
their personal computer in their home and also be able to watch TV on their personal
computer.
Question 4
Some say that we are at the beginning of a new era of computing. People are using labels
like "net-centric computer" as something that will take the place of the PC.
There are wide opportunities for many companies today and Microsoft is no longer in the
centre of this business. The issues regarding Sun and Hot Java have probably put Netscape
at the centre of this big change. Some people are also calling Netscape the new operating
system. How do you see this change in computing from the computer perspective?
Answer
The personal computer was basically born in the last 15 years - in 1980 almost had no-one
had a PC and now it seems as though almost everyone has a PC, so the PC has become the
central device. I think it will continue to be one of the central devices for accessing
information. TV will also be a device for accessing information and media, but the PC will
continue to be very important. From a business point of view, the PC will be the dominant
system. So there is a change occurring in the way people get the software that operates on
this PC. Some people call this change network-centric computing, but whatever you call it,
it's changing the style of accessing the software and receiving the software. There is a
new language called Java. In some ways it is just like old languages, but it has got some
unique features that make it more suitable for transmitting programs over the
telecommunications system. One of the ways that we see the change occurring is that
whereas today you may go to a software store and buy a CD-ROM or a diskette to install
your software on your computer, we think in the future you may visit a service for some
special, new capability like the news or for television or for your financial statement
from your bank. When you visit this service you will be automatically and transparently
delivered a small program, a computer program written in Java. This program will interpret
the data offered by the service. So rather than going to the software store to buy a
program that allows you to access the service, you use some general system such as
Netscape to interact with the service and over this channel you are then delivered this
program and the program then determines how to access the data. You might have your bank
account and your financial statement delivered through a service that you access over the
Internet and then this service delivers the program that's the spreadsheet program that
allows you to build your data and you may be able to pay bills and to move money from here
to there. And there may be other kinds which will allow the delivery of a program that
determines how the service is used so the program gets delivered with the service.
Question 5
Some people are saying that the financial market is reacting with too much optimism with
regard to the Internet, Netscape, and in general. Do you think they are over-optimistic?
Answer
One of the things that is very important is that we have a telecommunications system in
the world that is a US$1.2 trillion industry. It is one of the world's largest industries,
perhaps the world's largest single industry. This telecommunications industry is going
through a fundamental transformation, a change from a voice-oriented network to a
computer-oriented network. The first step in this transformation is the Internet. One of
the reasons that the financial market seems so excited about the Internet is that they
instinctively understand that when you have a US$1 trillion industry undergoing
fundamental change there is lots of opportunity - there is also lots of opportunity for
failure, but there is lots of opportunity for success. This is one of the reasons I think
that the stock markets have put such high value on companies such as Netscape. They
believe in the possibilities of a company such as this.
Question 6
Regarding new business models: you have experimented with Netscape - it is a new model of
distribution of your product, of your software. Some say that your software is free,
others have to pay. As a business model how do you see this novelty of giving software
almost free to some people?
Answer
Netscape started as a very small company with a clever idea, but the Internet presented an
opportunity. And the opportunity was to allow us to distribute our software over this
network. Now this network is available all over the world. At the time we started
Netscape, there were 25 million people connected to the network. Now, almost two years
later, there are 60 million people connected to the Internet. So we looked at the Internet
as a way to distribute our software. We knew that in order to be competitive with a
company like Microsoft, which had such a large installed base and such large world
recognition, we had to somehow develop a very large installed base of software. So we
chose to let people download our software free. The software has a licence agreement that
tells the customer this is for your evaluation, this is not truly free. Now, of course,
this licence agreement for an ordinary individual is OK. We don't care if the ordinary
individual wants to use the software. When a business wants to use the software - and this
is where most of our opportunity and our growth is coming from, from the use of our
software inside a business - these businesses are required to pay us some kind of licence
fee for each user. This is how we make our money. But an interesting point is that we have
now 20 million users of our software around the world and this is all in a little over one
year. This has never happened before, it is a unique business model, a unique development
for a company to make its software so widely available and expect to make money. There
were many people who thought that perhaps I was insane for using this kind of business
model, but it has turned out to be very successful.
Question 7
Could this be the key to the fact that you are still hiring and Microsoft has begun to lay
people off.
Answer
It is hard for me to believe that Microsoft is laying people off. I think Microsoft is a
very high quality company and will continue to be very successful, but that does not mean
that we won't be successful. There is room for a new kind of company and that's our kind
of company. Microsoft is an excellent company but they cannot control the world. The point
is that there are many opportunities in the world and we have one and we're going to be
the best at it.
Question 8
The future of telecommunications relies a lot on cables and there has been a lot of
discussion about who is going to pay for the Infohighway. Some people say that the
government should pay, others say it should be a matter of private industries. What do you
think?
Answer
Telecommunications is a business. Telecommunications is delivering data or connecting
people so that they can communicate data. This is a business opportunity. This is what
telecommunications companies will do in the future to make business. In addition, of
course, telecommunications companies will make business with voice communications but they
will also offer data communications. The information highway that everyone refers to - I
call it the Internet - will be paid for by people who need to use it for data
communications. The people who get paid will be those who provide the network, and the
providers of the network will be the telecommunications companies, the telephone companies
such as Stet or Telecom Italia or France Télécom or the local exchange carriers in the
United States. There may be others offering data communications services but the basic
industry will be the existing telecommunications industry.
Question 9
Do you think that this will grant universal access to everybody?
Answer
One of the concepts of the telephone system is universal access. Universal access means
everyone gets the opportunity to have a telephone. I think the same will also be true in
the future for data communications but not everyone needs data communications to their
home today. Businesses need data communications; businesses will have data communications
access, and over the next 10 to 15 to perhaps 20 years data communications will be as
uniformly available and universal access will be part of data communications just as it is
for voice communications today.
Question 10
HTML is the standard of telecommunication data on the WWW. There have been a lot of
changes since the first release and there has also been some divergence between the
standards released by the various commissions of the Internet and, for instance, your own
of Netscape Navigator standards. What do you think will be the future of standards?
Answer
In the voice communications system, in the telephone system, the concept of a standard is
very important in order to have everyone able to talk to everyone else. But even in our
lifetime, even in the last 15 years, some telephone system did not talk well with other
telephone systems. So the evolution of voice communication standards has been a very
important part of allowing everyone to communicate anywhere in the world. In the data
communications world the picture is much more complex because we are dealing with not only
voice, but images and text and electronic mail and audio and video. These are all forms of
data. So in the data communications world we have to have many different kinds of
standards and many different kinds of interfaces, so it is a much more complex system. In
the Internet there is a standard called HTML and HTTP. HTML means a mark-up language, it's
the language for transmission between two places on the Internet, on the WWW. This kind of
standard has to be enhanced over time to allow people to have a richer type of
interaction, richer kinds of media, so it has to change, it has to incorporate newer and
newer kinds of technology such as voice and video. And as a result, HTML is changing and
in some cases it is changing very rapidly. As a company, Netscape feels that it must
evolve this standard very rapidly because this is part of what makes the world change. You
add new capability, people get more functionality, more capability in their WWW system, in
their Internet access and therefore people can do much more interesting things, so we
think it's very important to have this kind of change.
Question 11
Do you think trade and the commercial communication on the Net will grow? There have been
a lot of questions about shopping on the Net, because of the problem of security and
problems like seeing and touching the things they are going to buy. Do you think that the
trade on the Net will have a future?
Answer
Absolutely. When we go to the automatic teller machine or we go to the bank today we
present a card and we get our money. We conduct lots of business electronically. Of
course, electronic business means data being communicated and information being
communicated over telecommunications wires. The Internet is the world's largest
telecommunications system for data. So it is natural to expect that the Internet will
become a system on which we do financial transactions. People have lots of concerns about
the Internet; one of the major concerns is the security of the Internet. But in fact the
Internet, with data encryption technology, is much more secure even than the phone system.
The telephone system is insecure because the telephone company operates the phone system
and when you have a voice conversation that's converted into data and goes through these
telecommunications wires it is not encrypted at all, so someone could pick this data up
and understand a conversation. An encrypted telecommunications system over the Internet is
very safe. Just to illustrate this, I know of at least three major world banks who are
going to be offering the ability to do all types of banking transactions over the
Internet: buying stocks, moving money, doing large transfers of money, and paying bills. I
think it's a very safe system and over the course of 1996 I think we are going to find
lots of companies beginning to offer goods and services that can be paid for over the
Internet very safely using your smartcards and other kinds of technology - credit cards,
smartcards, debit cards etc. It is a very powerful system that will be used for this and I
think 1996 will be the first year in which major business is done over the Internet.
Question 12
Lately the FCC has released the standard for high definition TV. And it is not compatible
with PC standards. What do you think about this?
Answer
In the United States, the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, has worked for at
least seven to eight years trying to define some system for high definition television.
When they first started this effort, they were thinking entirely analogue TV, just like
current TV but with a better picture. In the last 7 - 10 years, the world has gone from
being analogue-oriented to primarily data oriented, so future high definition TV will be
digital. The new standard being proposed by the FCC and being endorsed by the FCC will be
a digital standard. A digital standard means the data arrives at the television set and
there is some special decoder that assembles this data and makes a picture. Now this kind
of digital capability can easily be interpreted by a computer, so future computers will be
able to decode this high definition television signal. The issue will be how big the
screen will be, but they will be able to interpret this data.
Question 13
Do you see in the MPEG4 standard the possibility for interactive television?
Answer
Digital data delivered in moving picture form is digital television and being able to
interact with that means being able to stop and start and do as you will. So the format
that the data is encoded in is irrelevant in that sense. The important thing about
computers is that they are programmable. And when video data becomes interactive and
digital, you are able to program different algorithms for receiving different kinds of
signals. If they make the algorithm too complex so that the current computer cannot decode
it then they have to build a specialised chip that decodes the signal. So today you have
MPEG2 chips, you have MPEG algorithms that run on Pentium PCs, so it's always a trade-off.
The more complex the algorithm, the more you need a specialised chip. A new chip or a new
technology that's better for higher compression of images might be invented and it may
require a specialised chip. Perhaps also five years later you no longer require a
specialised chip but can use a general purpose chip.
|
