INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Imagine you are speaking to a child, how would you explain what an operating system is and
why it is so important?
Answer
That's very hard. Children shouldn't know or care about it. They want to be able to talk
with their friends, create things, make things move; draw and create universes. Far below
that are the little pieces of software that control the resources of the computer. That's
all an operating system is. It controls the storage devices, the disks, or the network or
the screen or the keyboard or the voice recognition. Anything that is used by the computer
to allow the child to draw, to speak, to make music, to communicate with their friends -
the plumbing - is the operating system.
Question 2
Should we have many software manufacturers or only one big powerful company?
Answer
It's a horrible idea and an impossible idea to have only one centre of creativity. Just as
a historical accident, for a very short period of time - five to ten years - one company
has placed software on one kind of a computer, it was a contract with IBM to begin with,
and then everyone copied IBM because it was simple. So Microsoft's domination of 100
million computers means nothing in a world where there are a billion computers. If you
look at the smart cards - which are computers - which enter into every cellular telephone,
into the automobile, in your wallet; every year hundreds and millions of them are made.
There will be half a billion of them next year. If you look inside your watch and inside
your automobile, and inside your television set and inside all the devices that human
beings use, those are a thousand times larger in number than the number of PCs. So that's
the future, linking and networking all these smart devices that bring the world alive.
Question 3
What do you think of Microsoft's strategy?
Answer
Microsoft is one company that wrote software that went onto one kind of a computer. There
are thousands of kinds of computers. They focused only on a desktop computer, not
networked. All the rest of us focused on networked computers for people to communicate and
share things and that's what we've built. And now Microsoft is attempting to move into
that world, which is good, because it brings all of those isolated, lonely little
computers doing spreadsheets into a community that shares things. It brings dangers,
however, because when the computers can all talk, if the systems are not secure, you
cannot trust them. You cannot use them for business, you can't control aeroplanes in the
air, you can't control the power grid for the electric system. You would never use
Microsoft's software on the trading floor of the stock exchanges where US$1 trillion, a
thousand billion dollars, is traded in one day. You can't use that fragile software for a
standalone machine in that environment. But bit by bit we're bringing those more powerful
machines onto the desks of everyone, which means the new software that destroys the old
software, Windows NT, Windows'95, UNIX, all of those operating systems will vanish in the
next five to ten years because they are products of twenty-year old thinking. The new
world is the world of computers linked by the network, that distribute programs around
constantly. If you'd like to run some program, it will come from Tokyo or from New York or
from Milan; it will assemble itself on your computer and do what you tell it to do. That's
the new world and that's based on the network.
Question 4
What about the dispute between Sun and Microsoft? What do you think they are doing wrong
and why is there a suit against Microsoft?
Answer
The United States government said that Microsoft was using its immense amount of money and
its market power to force every company it did business with to use a product they might
not want. And the court said that was true, that Microsoft was a criminal company in doing
that. And by forcing all companies to do what Microsoft wanted them to do, they were
unlawfully using their power as a monopoly. So the United States government said Microsoft
had to stop its criminal use of its monopoly power. We had a dispute with Microsoft simply
about the way that they use Java. They promised to include in everything they shipped a
series of objects that would let a child write a program and the program could find those
objects on a piece of Microsoft software. And they left out two of them on purpose. So we
said, you no longer fulfil the contract, you cannot the name "Java" and the
little coffee cup [logo]. That's all; it's just a dispute about whether they tell the
truth in what they ship. There's a deeper issue which is the building of a world in which
anyone in the world can write a program and expect it to run on any computer in the world.
The phrase we use is "ubiquitous computing". You should write a program and that
program should be able to run on any computer in the world. That completely changes the
economics of software and it frees all the creativity of people around the world to enter
into the world market. So someone smart in Bangkok can create a program tomorrow that
could change your life. And they could put it on the Net and it will run on your computer
and they can enter the world economy with that program. They don't have to pass through
Microsoft or pass through Sun or pass through IBM.
Question 5
Could you tell us about Java, its history - beginning with its name - and why it is
important?
Answer
There are hundreds of thousands of different computers. The computer in your watch is
different from the computer in your telephone or in your cell phone or in your automobile
carburettor. They each have different ways of programming them. Java was designed to run
on all of them, so it's the first language whose primary design is to be able to run on
any computer. This is not a new idea, it's just an implementation of it that was very
carefully engineered to run on the network. So in the future there will be hundreds of
other programming languages, but for the first time in world history one programming
language runs on every computer. A child can write a program and they know it will run on
the IBM mainframe, on the CRAY super computer, on the Windows 3.1 little desktop machine.
This is the first time this has ever happened. We're changing the way you design
computers. Because now if you have fast networks, you don't have to keep it all in a box.
Pieces can be distributed because they can speak at high speeds, so the disc can be
somewhere else. Something can be linked to a disc in Beijing and use that as a local disc.
If you need the data right away, I'd suggest moving it closer, but that's easy to do.
Fibre optics are ringing the world now. So we have speed of light connectivity to
anywhere, which means the entire earth, every computing device on it, can join into one
big computer. Java is a programming language. It began named "Green". It was a
small language which ran in television controllers so that Thompson and Philips and Sony
and Mitsubishi could put it in the television set. "Green" wasn't a very good
name, so we decided we'd name it again. Someone asked James Gosling , the creator of Java,
the name of the language? He looked out of the window of his office, saw an oak tree, and
he said, "Oak". Well, it turned out someone else had already used the name
"oak"; we found this out a year later. So everyone went and sat in a
coffee-house. On the walls were coffee bags from Brazil and around the world, and
"java" is a slang term for coffee. And somebody just said: let's name it 'Java'.
No one asked the permission of Indonesia. We just named it after this word which is a
synonym for coffee.
Question 6
Could you give us a simple definition of network computing theory and its importance for
the future?
Answer
Computers communicate with each other. If they're in a small box, they do it over some
wires in the back of the box and they speak very quickly. The computer speaks to the
memory and pulls things from memory; it speaks ten thousand times more slowly out to a
disc and pulls things from a disc. It all lives in one small box. If you can run a fast
link that is as fast as the wires inside - and fibre optics do this - the disc could be a
thousand kilometres away and have just a slightly increased delay in sending information
into that computer. So the network computer is a computer that speaks to thousands of
other computers across a fast network, which means that you can begin to break up the
parts of it and spread them around. If someone is very good at storing information- let's
say in Bari; everything is stored on huge discs in Bari - then Rome can use Bari as a
local disc. The network connection lets it seem as if Bari is in Rome. It also lets it
seem as if Rome is in Bari. So everything that's available in Rome can seem as if it's
local to you in Bari. That's the power of the network. In the old days, when all you had
were the telephone lines that allowed a few thousand characters a second to flow across
it, you couldn't send images; it wasn't fast enough. With fibre that goes a million
characters a second, a million, million characters a second and suddenly you have the
possibility to make things arrive instantly wherever you are. So when RAI broadcasts, it
doesn't broadcast; it sends some signals to satellite and it sends others instantly across
the fibre to Bologna, and it seems in Bologna as if you're in the RAI studios in Rome. You
can't tell the difference. That's what a network computer is. It links all these sources
of information together.
Question 7
Is it important to encourage children to use computers?
Answer
The most important thing we can do with computers is to allow children to use them,
because they will create the new ideas, the new companies, and the new economies. You
could say the Nintendo or the Sega generation think differently. They have an innate
familiarity, they're comfortable with computers that speak to each other. Because it's a
language and a philosophy of how the world is, it's a form of literature that is not
accessible to those of us that don't live in a networked world. It's a new literary
construct: linked books, linked phrases, linked thoughts. It makes the entire computer
system a library more complicated than the library Umberto Eco wrote about. It allows all
the books to speak to each other. So, the most important thing is to provide a pathway for
a child to become involved in that. Every classroom in Italy should have a pathway for
every student, if possible, and linked to the home; it's just a network. The devices to do
this in the past have cost US$2,000 or US$3,000; that's too expensive. But that cost has
gone down to US$100 or US$200. Look at the Sega, look at the Nintendo. The game machines
are very powerful network computers. Link them to a network and they link you to the
libraries of the world. So the most important thing for the students is to use this new
window into the library of the worlds made possible by a networked computer. And as the
price comes down to US$10, which it will - cellular telephones in the United States are
now sold for US$5 or US$10 -, everyone will be able afford them. Then we come to the more
difficult question: if you have a new literary device, who creates the new literary works?
Who writes, who reads, who draws, who communicates? That's the higher level of skills.
Question 8
So what is the future for the Net-Day Project?
Answer
Governments, ministries are too slow. They want to have a meeting the first sign of
danger. When you go to the Ministry of Education and say: We'd like to link all the
schools in Italy, they say: Let's have a meeting. We don't want meetings. What we want is
activity. We know the answer. You put category 5 wire, which is a name for a very
high-speed phone wire, which costs nothing, or fibre and you put it around a classroom
anyone can do it. So I decided to ask every engineer in the world to go to their child's
school and ask the principal of the school to let them put in the networking inside the
school. If the principal says no, you say to the principal: please move out of the way,
we're the parents. To make this crazy idea work I used the web. I used the new power of
publishing because I could at zero cost publish a web page for every school, first in
California, then in the United States: 140,000 web pages live behind that screen. You
touch any dot there and it goes to the school. Zooms right down and you can see all the
schools or you can even see your house. And you can see by the colour of the dot if it's a
school that is networked or not. So if it's red you know its a school that needs help and
then volunteer. All I did was put up web pages that allowed engineers to volunteer,
parents to volunteer. The first day we did this in March of 1996, 100,000 Californians
volunteered and wired 4,000 schools in one day. Who paid for the wire? The parents paid.
Parents will do anything so their child has access to the future. That's the heart of
Net-Day: don't wait for the government, don't wait for the school. You know how right now,
go and do it.
Question 9
Who connects the computers tot he network?
Answer
The project started just to provide step one: get the interior connectivity in the school.
Step two: have the connection from the school to the Internet. Now, that involves the
telephone company. So you have to pay someone. In the United States President Clinton and
Vice President Gore and the head of the Federal Communications Commission said it is the
most important step for American competitiveness in the world economy to link the schools,
so we will take US$2 billion from the beginning of January 1998 to link every school and
library in the United States to the Internet. Who will pay for it? The telephone companies
will pay for it, and the cable companies, and RAI, and the television companies.
Question 10
So Net-Day is an ongoing project?
Answer
Net-Day is a project to bring network technology to every school in the world. In many of
the schools of the world there is no electrical power, the children don't have enough to
eat. There are serious problems. It's just a method to provide this publishing wealth of
the rich world to all of those schools in the rest of the world that have nothing. They
don't have textbooks, they have nothing. In Central City in the United States people are
using textbooks in schools that are twenty years old. They talk about the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. Well, life has moved on. On the net everything is published and it's
free. You can get on the Internet and see everything. So we thought we'd take the
constantly dropping price of the technology and allow the most important part of the world
- the children - to have access to the riches of the world that we have created.
Question 11
New technology brings new opportunities but what can we do for the people who cannot buy
the new technologies?
Answer
It's true. Those that have no capability of learning about the new technology will be
excluded. In Bangladesh, throughout Africa, there is a generation doomed by today's
economic situation to being excluded. It's a simple question of price and the price is
dropping. Twenty years ago, to think that there would be a television set in most homes in
the poorest parts of Africa was a crazy idea. There are television sets everywhere. Radios
have dropped to a dollar so people can hear radio broadcasts. With the arrival of the low
earth orbit satellites, a device that costs US$10 or US$20 can link directly to a
satellite. That's new. So the arrival of global interconnectivity and the constantly
dropping price of it, suddenly makes it possible to reach parts of the world never before
reachable. Another part of Net-Day is to make a device that listens to the satellite - it
costs US$100 - it takes web pages published in the hundreds of millions by the satellite
and puts them onto a small disc locally. Nine gigabytes of disc space, costs US$200; it is
big enough to store all the Vatican artwork. That disc sitting connected to a dish then
allows that remote village to have the Vatican's treasures locally and then made
accessible to tiny computer game-like devices for US$100 - visible locally at high speed.
Many of these things can be built with solar panels or even with wind-up technology, so
you don't need electricity. So we're going to distribute hundreds of thousands of these in
the world. The World Bank, the Interamerican Bank for South America, the Asian Development
Bank, the large banks view this as the best single investment for economic development in
all the poorest countries of the world.
Question 12
So the network of the future will be a satellite network?
Answer
It will be a combination, because satellites have a delay. The low ones, which are only
120 kilometres above your head, are quite fast, like the new, the Iridium Project. There
are ten separate projects to put very low satellites in orbit. They used to be only for
spies. Now, the commercial entities are putting them there. And through your body in Italy
many satellite signals are passing right at this moment. They could be received by a very
small dish. We could take the RAI television signal, which reaches throughout Italy, and
insert into the television signal thousands of web pages, artwork, in the existing
television signal. The device to decode that costs US$5, one chip. So you can decode. So I
can be in the most remote village in the Mezzogiorno and I can receive RAI and from the
signal bring web pages from any museum or library or other school in the world and put it
on a local machine and then use that to help teach. So, textbooks are expensive; this is a
way to have the world's riches arrive for free.
Question 13
We have talked about teaching children, but who is going to teach the teachers?
Answer
The major problem in putting anything in a school is decreasing the barrier. Anything new
that arrives in a school and the teacher has to spend time learning how to use is a
barrier. Teachers don't have time, they don't have money. They have thirty students, they
have to know the students and attempt to learn what they're like and try to help them
learn. The teacher can do a wonderful job with a piece of chalk and a blackboard; that may
be all the teacher needs. A way to talk to the student, understand the student, and speak
to the heart of that student. France had a disastrous experiment when they put 40,000
terrible computers in schools and wasted hundreds of millions of dollars. More important,
they wasted teachers' time. Teachers don't have time. So when a web browser arrives that a
teacher can learn to use in one minute, you say to the teacher there's nothing to learn.
Bring up Umberto Eco's page and there's the complete text of anything he's written. Touch
it and you can read it. The teacher understands this instantly. Now the hard part occurs.
How does the teacher use this to help the student? So what we've found in curriculum
development, as things change the computers can aid in letting students see things they
could never see before. You can watch the orbits of the planets. You can go into the heart
of a living cell and see the interactions of the chemical constituents of the cell. Those
exploratory things the students can do on their own help the students learn in a new way
they'd never had access to before. And if it's well done, they don't have to read a manual
to do it, they just explore as they do with the video games.
Question 14
Surfing the Internet could also be unsafe for kids. So I would like to know your opinion
about controlling access to the Internet.
Answer
The hardest question about education is what do you teach. Many people trust their
children to a teacher whose name they don't know and they hope the teacher will teach them
something valuable. When the student leaves school, the student will need to make choices.
Students who are too young to have standards need the help of their parents, need the help
of their family, need the help of their teachers, need the help of their church. All of
those influences that guide our tastes need to be applied to what's on the Internet. There
are some technical ways to block pages we know will be immediately offensive: the live sex
shows in Amsterdam. We know immediately that that's not something that the child should
see. It's very easy to block that sort of thing. The more difficult things to block are
people who write untrue statements. There's no test for that. Human beings have a hard
enough time. So there's where we do need the constant presence of students and teachers
together exploring. And that's why it's so important that this connectivity occur in the
schools where there's guidance, in the homes where there is guidance. Very often today
parents do not supervise what children watch on television. This is a danger Aristotle
recognised a long time ago. The debate has always gone on about art as a potential source
of damage to the child. I think that with the access to everything you soon learn what is
valuable for you. You learn as you grow older what you'll spend time on and what you think
is valuable for others. It's different for everyone. And so you should have access to
everything. Eco's library had areas that were forbidden by the Church for anyone to read.
The Church still maintains a list of works that they do not find acceptable for those that
believe to read. I believe the Internet brings a new capability. I have my list of things
I recommend. I have my list of things I think are bad. If I put that list up, then you can
use me as a guide. Would you trust my taste in movies? Maybe not. But you might trust my
taste in books about computing, in which case you'd use me as a guide. So I think we'll
see a brand new world emerging where many people can offer what their opinions are. And if
you choose to follow someone's opinion, it's very easy for you to see which pages they
think are valuable and then you can search those out.
Question 15
What is the Unicode Project?
Answer
The important thing to realise is that most of the computers developed in 1970, 1980, 1990
are junk. They were all developed using English as the primary language. Most of the world
doesn't speak English. So five years ago, a combination of companies: Microsoft, Sun,
Apple, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center - the core of much of the advanced thinking of
computing - worked together to put all the 6,000 world scripts into the computer. Every
year there are a million technical graduates from China. They don't want to write in
English, they want to write their programs in Chinese. And Unicode as a way to bring every
script into the computer and to allow all the computers to understand. Microsoft, Sun, IBM
and Apple all agreed to do that. Today we're close to a world where you can read Umberto
Eco's books translated into 30 languages, and you can see all thirty languages on the same
screen. This is an advance. Many people speak several languages. It always helps to see
the same text in multiple languages. So our goal is to make these computers into what they
really are: a reading and writing machine.
Question 16
So you write a text in Italian and then it is automatically translated into other
languages?
Answer
That's a level above. This was simply to solve the problem of being able to write in
Arabic, which writes from right to left, or Hebrew or Thai, which has a very complicated
way of writing, or in Chinese, which can be written vertically, to unify what's underneath
in the operating system of the computers, so that any computer can display all human
languages. Next are the difficult problems of understanding what a text means in one
language and translating it into another. There's a lot of work in that, but that's very
hard to do. I can translate computer manuals - they're boring - from one language to
another without too much difficulty, with a narrow vocabulary. Translating Dante is very
difficult. Our goal is to make the computer as smart as a three-year old or a four-year
old with that command of language. And we're just beginning to approach that now.
Question 17
Do you know when this will be available?
Answer
Today I could take Il Sole 24 ore in Italian, pass it through translation programs into
English and be able to read it. It's business news, it's not complicated. I could not take
a literary work and trust it. But today software exists to translate Italian, French, the
Romance languages, into a number of other languages. There's also an enormous amount of
work for Russian, a remnant of the Cold War. All the armies wanted to be able to listen to
the Russians and have the computer help them translate. The more complicated questions are
for the rare languages. One of the basic functions and the reason it's also very important
to bring the network to every school and to every library in Italy and the world, is to
preserve literatures and to allow new literature to be created. When the first Basque
novel was written six years ago it was the first original work in Basque for centuries,
because there are no printing plants, there is no market. With the Internet there's
suddenly a global market, so any literature can be created, published, shared, and
possibly paid for across the Internet.
Question 18
Some say that the more we connect people, the more they will stay at home.
Answer
Anyone who is forty or fifty years old has memories of their childhood with no television.
They remember playing soccer in the streets and running in the park and being outside more
than they are now. Because today with television an entire generation spends much more
time inside. Now, you could argue that this is good. It's a balance. But there's no
arguing it away; it's part of our life today. The telephone has also changed how we meet
people. Rather than go to the café to see someone, I'll call them on the telephone. So
we've watched the last eighty years transform society into a more isolated, more removed,
non-personal way of communicating. But on the other side, we've changed the world so that
any child in Italy today can pick the telephone up and talk to a child in China. I see the
Internet as healthy in a way because it means you interact. So my daughter, who is
fifteen, spends more time on the Internet than watching television.
Question 19
Can you say something about the history of the microprocessor?
Answer
For the last twenty years people have been making circuits that fit on a tiny piece of
silicon, and you have to have software to make these circuits run programs. There are many
different languages people use to make these chips work. But when you put them into a
device that people find useful, it often begins to be a monopoly because people like to
share common technology. So Intel made a chip, not a very good chip but they made a lot of
them, and they became processors inside the desktop workstations. PCs don't go very fast
but they're adequate for people to read and write and do spreadsheets on. Meanwhile CRAY
was making chips that went very fast and could calculate the hearts of stars and calculate
enormous fluid flow problems for the weather; those are super computers. IBM, Sun,
Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics and Digital Equipment Company made other processors,
much faster than the ones Intel made, and they were used for more advanced things: to
design Fiats or to be able to run the telephone system. Those kinds of chips have come
down in cost to where they now go into the desktop workstation. Meanwhile, the Intel chips
have got faster, so what we'll see in the next five or ten years are more and more chips
that used to be slow and required a lot of very fine programming deep down in the chip to
make it go fast. But now the chips double in speed every 18 months, so you could ignore
which chip it is. That's the first major advance. You never need to ask again if is it an
Intel or a Spark or an IBM chip, Power PC; you don't care. The software runs on all of
them. The power of this, which is so important for Italian schools, is when the browsers
emerged, because in Geneva a physicist invented a way to put on a screen a page of
information. It looked like a book linked to other pages. You didn't need a manual, you
didn't need to be trained. You could read the book. So Umberto Eco could have everything
he wrote up and you could turn the page on a screen and learn and it ran on every
computer. It ran on every computer. The first major problem solved for the schools. So the
browsers which allow you to do human things like read and write are the first major step
to make computers useable in the schools. I'd say that before the browsers, computers were
not useable in the schools. They wasted the teacher's time, they wasted the student's
time, and they did boring things.
Question 20
Can you give us a brief history of the PC and operating systems.
Answer
In 1980 - 1981 people said: we've been making small chips that control things; we could
put more intelligence in the chips. So the first microprocessors emerged that had the
ability to be programmed by a good programming language. One crazy guy said: We could make
a very small, quite weak chain but it's good enough for a lot of applications, so let's do
it. Oh no, said IBM, that's a silly idea. We make big computers and make lots of money
from banks. I want to make a small machine that has a screen on it that people can use
just to type. Oh no, said the IBM typewriter company, bad idea! You'll replace our
existing typewriters. No, he said, it will do a little more than that. It will be a little
computer and not very powerful. But I don't have any software. So they said: if you can
get software in the next few weeks, maybe we'll let the project go ahead. So he came out
to Santa Cruz and went to a man that made software that made very, very small 8-bit,
16-bit processors work. And he said: would you for a few hundred thousand dollars license
us this software? And the man said he'd think about it. Too slow. So they went to Bill
Gates, who didn't have anything at all, and told him they needed an operating system to
make this computers work. Come back in about an hour, said Bill Gates. He ran out the back
door and found a man who had something called the "Quick and dirty operating
system"—QDOS. He said, he'd give him a few hundred dollars for it. He went back
to IBM and offered to sign a contract. IBM didn't know that he didn't write it, that it
didn't have anything to do with Bill Gates, but it was something that would make this
small machine work. They needed it, they grabbed it, they put it on the small machine, and
they began to sell these things. They didn't sell very well but they were useful. Then
someone invented spreadsheets. And all of a sudden people could see that there was a real
use for this. It was a way to do something that you did on paper before, but this time the
computer added and you could see the numbers add and your budget would have the right
answer at the bottom. This was a great use and these machines took off: hundreds of
thousands sold for nothing more than to make people's budgets. Then the word processing
got better. And for the next ten years all these computers did was word processing and
spreadsheets. Those are the main applications. There are others, hundreds of other
applications, but one hundredth of one percent of the population uses them. So that's the
point of them. They were small, they didn't have any networking, they didn't talk to
anybody. The operating system you couldn't even call an operating system: a few pieces of
software that made the disc sometimes retrieve the file you needed, very low quality,
easily broken. Sometimes I think if we added up the hours wasted by Bill Gates' software,
it is the single, largest engineering crime in history. Millions of years of people's
lives have been spent trying to find that file that vanished, trying to start the machine:
it crashes four or five times a day. Each time fifteen minutes, twenty minutes of your
life is stolen by Bill Gates. Does he pay you? He never pays. So we're going to put a web
page up called "Billing Bill". Each hour you've wasted trying to bring that game
up for your child and having to read the manual and call Microsoft's support. And go buy a
book for US$70 to tell you the secrets of Windows'95, you just mail in those hours. A
simple calculation: you waste 100 hours a year on your PC. 150 million times 100 hours is
2.5 million years of people's time wasted each year trying to make these Microsoft PCs do
something. And it's a crime. It steals time away from people that could otherwise be
creating something. That's the reason, if we have a dispute with Microsoft about the
quality of software, it's not a dispute with all of Microsoft. Half of Microsoft sees Java
as the saviour of Microsoft. The move from a world of mediocre software that breaks a lot
into a world where things are safe is a very important step to preserve Microsoft.
Microsoft won't die. But if people can't trust it and can't rely on it to keep working,
you can't use the software. So half of Microsoft is attempting to move forward and
increase the quality of what they do and one of their tools to do that is Java. The other
half is worried that their existing revenue flow will be cut short by the competition from
kids in Bari and kids in Bologna, kids who are creating new software that will then
compete and take the market away from Microsoft.
Question 21
What are your predictions for the future?
Answer
Things will change. Yes. Now, remember Intel sells 40 million, maybe 50 million chips a
year. Samsung, NEC, Mitsubishi sell 30 million a month. So PCs are a very small part of
the computing environment. Every automobile that Fiat makes has computers in it. Every
wristwatch that Swatch makes has a computer in it. And those are the devices that are
important. When you talk about the Internet today, the hot thing of today is linking
people. Well, we've been doing that for twenty years. The scientific community, the
military community, the intelligence community, that's the spies, have all been linked for
a very long time. Because it's critical, all of the trading floors, the investment
bankers, the stock exchanges, they've all been linked for a very long time. There's real
money there. People live or die by making these things work together. PCs have been
immature. We don't use them for this because you can't trust them. So in the overall world
of computing, the arrival of a way to make programs run on everything from the 500 million
smart cards all the way to the CRAY, the same program running in your cell phone and in
your smart card and in your automobile, this is the arrival of something new. So all that
you know for PCs, everything you've seen is going to vanish. Windows'95 will be gone. It
will be gone in the same sense that Windows 3.1 is gone: more than half of PCs still run
Windows 3.1. But in a four or five-year cycle, the older machines are so weak, there's so
little power in the 286s and 386s that they'll be replaced by something new. Remember
we're doubling the speed of the processors every year. So the inventory of world computers
will shift enormously in the next three or four years. Just look at Nintendo. That device
is a serious computer and it costs US$100. So, it's more powerful than a PC.
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