INTERVIEW:
Question 1
In the last decade Internet has been chaotic and people surfing on the Net love anarchy.
Industry, on the other hand, want to develop commerce and secure applications and needs a
different kind of Net. What is your opinion?
Answer
The Internet is still very young and like all technologies and people, when you're very
young you are unruly and anarchic and everything is possible. But then you get more
responsibility and you have to learn the balance between being very creative and doing a
lot of things and being more responsible. The Internet is in that kind of awkward teenage
period. And I'm convinced that it will emerge from that teenage period to being very
responsible, to making sure businesses can depend on it and people can feel safe and with
all their private data.
Question 2
But perhaps also in the business field something has to change because there are opinion
leader that say the companies that will win in the next decade have to change their way of
thinking and working. In what way?
Answer
If people just look at the Internet and think, "let's use parts of it and do business
the same way", they are missing the point. The point is that now that you can reach
everybody, day or night, electronically, so how can you do things very differently? What
exciting new applications can you develop that capture the imagination of the people but
at the same time let you operate it very efficiently? And those businesses that are
behaving very creatively are winning out and moving ahead, and those businesses that are
boring, that don't know how to be creative, will be left behind.
Question 3
And IBM is changing itself in this way?
Answer
Absolutely, absolutely. In IBM we are going to use the Web to communicate with everybody
out there, to communicate with all of our customers, the press, the consultants, with
analysts to provide customer support, business partners, for using the private section of
the Web, what we call the Intranet part, to communicate with all of our employees so they
can track their retirement accounts, their business investments, their health care
facilities. So we ourselves are trying to be productive to increase communications and to
do it in a very efficient way.
Question 4
Can you give us an example of health care applications?
Answer
Health care is an excellent application to bring to the Web because it is so fragmented.
You have many hospitals, you have lots of physicians, each one totally independent; you
have technicians, laboratories, and they don't communicate with each other very well.
Everything takes too long and it's very expensive in administrative work. With the
Internet you can now develop very secure networks to let all these various people
communicate more efficiently: ship medical records in seconds rather than days, get the
results of the laboratory tests very quickly, have a physician contact the hospital very
quickly. And as a result, reducing the time and the cost in which you do everything. All
of a sudden, productivity increases. And we need that very badly in the health care field.
Question 5
At the IDC Forum you said there are new technologies emerging also for storage and
analysing data. Is IBM involved in this?
Answer
One of the things that we discovered when we had our big chess match with Gary Kasparov
--Deep Blue we call it--is that people were fascinated by what happens when you have lots
of information and you search for it very efficiently in a chess match. People were saying
that the computer was behaving as if it were intelligent. You can let your imagination go
and look for many other opportunities to apply this principle of intelligence to many
human activities. For example, a bank can offer its customers expert financial advice by
having lots of financial information personalised to that customer and offering them a few
options that the world's experts would recommend for that individual. If you are a
physician, maybe in a remote part of the world, and you need to make a diagnosis and you
don't have libraries around you, you can go to the Web and put in the symptoms and it can
give back the most expert advice, so that physician can now make the most expert diagnosis
possible. You can use information to organise a market so that you can move inventory very
efficiently and save money. There are lots of opportunities for this kind of "machine
intelligence" to make people's lives better.
Question 6
But isn't the cost of this kind of parallel processing machine very high?
Answer
Not really. The cost of any one machine may be a little high. But the costs are coming
down and these machines would be shared by thousands of people, so the cost of any
individual access would be relatively low. In particular, if you compare it to the cost of
trying to make an intelligent choice by having to talk to people or to experts who go
back, think about it, come back two days later and give you an answer: those costs are
much higher than a machine acting as an expert assistant and in a matter of a few seconds
giving you an answer. That is going to be much less expensive.
Question 7
What are the last developments in the software to create intelligent agents ?
Answer
We have intelligent agents to help people deal with the Web. Essentially, the concept of
intelligence always implies science fiction. It is really to automate some of the things
that a computer can do well to make people's lives easier. If you want access to a lot of
different information, the agent can learn that from you and give you that access very
efficiently, so that you push a button, essentially you ask a few questions, and it goes
and brings it to you. The agent can learn from the usage you make of the Web and adapt
itself to what you do, not unlike an intelligent waiter or concierge who knows you well
and knows where you like to sit, what you like to eat because they have adapted to your
life. We can start developing little pieces of software that can behave similarly and
therefore make your life easier when you're using the computer.
Question 8
But how is this software made? With Java?
Answer
The software can be made in a number of ways. One of the main advantages of using a
language built around standards, which is what Java is, is that now software can be
distributed electronically and can run on any computer. And the person building this
software doesn't have to know ahead of time whether you are using Windows '95 or Windows
3.1, Apple, OS/2 or a network computer, a big workstation; they don't care. They build
their software and they say: If you want expert assistance, click here and we'll help you.
When you click here, this Java component comes down, installs itself in your device, and
starts helping you. That's why standards are so very nice. Java is part of the cultural
standards of the Internet.
Question 9
Can you see useful applications of intelligent agents also in electronic commerce?
Answer
Absolutely. In electronic commerce, the intelligent agent can help a business search for
goods and services all over the Net. Rather than search over millions of facts, an
intelligent agent starts filtering down and narrowing the gap, so that you search for the
most relevant pieces of information that apply to you. That is one of the ways it can help
consumers. If you are interested in product information, let's say for automobiles, you
don't want to manually have to spend hours searching lots and lots of sites, and if you
have some nice agents and directories that can quickly help you find exactly what you
want, then in a matter of a few minutes you can find the exact information you're
interested in and save time.
Question 10
Now in the field of electronic commerce, IBM wants to offer solutions. Can you explain
your strategy and give some examples?
Answer
What we learned is that there is so much technology possible that increasingly talking to
customers about technology is not the most important thing. Not because the technology is
not important, but because there is so much of it and it's so good that customers say: OK,
now tell me how to use it. What value does it bring? What they mean is: Help me understand
now this technology can solve my business problems and bring value to my customers. For
example, when we talked to Swiss Railways, we developed some Web sites with them that
allow their customers to go to their Website from anywhere in the world. You can copy
train schedules, book a ticket, and buy it with a credit card, and get a ticket
automatically. That has real value to them. It takes lots of technology underneath, but we
talk about the value to Swiss Railways. Again in Switzerland, there is a consortium of
about 14 real estate agents who let their customers find information about what they want
to buy on-line. They have pooled their resources , so you can go to their Web site and get
lots of real estate information. The Arena of Verona has put all of their performances
on-line, so you can find out what is playing, where If you are in Chicago and you're
thinking of going to Verona, you can find out what's going beforehand and order or reserve
a ticket and pay for it with your credit card, all from Chicago. Those are all examples of
solutions, applications that have real value to people, to business and to society in
general.
Question 11
When you have to buy a ticket or something very light over the network, OK. But what about
larger goods?
Answer
I think that the marketplace reacts very quickly to capabilities that bring value. And
when people all over Europe see such good capabilities, they will immediately come to it.
Sometimes they may come a little slower than in the US or in Japan, sometimes they may
come faster, but in a world in which there is such high communication, people learn very
quickly what is good and move towards it. That's why I'm absolutely convinced that the
progress will be worldwide. In the area of how to ship goods, what's happening is that the
whole logistic systems, what we call the supply chain, is using networks to become very
efficient. The vendor that sends you a book on-line or in a business-to-business
application like Supervox, which is a wholesaler that offers things for sale through
catalogues to retailers, you become linked electronically to a shipping company, the one
of your choice, that will immediately give you information about what you bought, when you
want it delivered, where to go, all happening very quickly, so that you can get your
merchandise delivered very efficiently, the day after or in a few days.
Question 12
What is SET?
Answer
SET or Secure Encrypted Transaction is a standard that credit card companies have agreed
to use for credit card or debit card purchases over the Internet very safely. We at IBM
work very closely with VISA, Mastercard and others to help them use technologies for our
laboratories to be on the SET standard. What is good about SET is that you get a digital
certificate from your bank or some other trusted institution, and then when you use your
credit card, the merchant only gets your digital certificate; they never see your credit
card. It's very important: your credit card is very safe. This digital certificate says:
Go to this bank. Only the bank knows your credit card, and the bank matches the digital
certificate with your credit card and decides whether to approve your record or not, sends
back the answer to the merchant, all very quickly, and the merchant gives you back the
answer. This is the safest way you can do credit card or debit car transactions, because
your actual credit card is only seen by you and your bank, not by anybody in between.
Question 13
One of the next big challenges is learning. Can you imagine the possibilities that the Net
will offer in the future?
Answer
First of all, learning is extremely important, because if you look at the skills of the
people in the information society, they are all round: how do they deal with information,
how do they read, analyse, understand, do research, how do they write e-mail so that other
people understand what they are saying well, how can they work in teams efficiently and
learn to collaborate. That requires a much higher level of education from everybody who
would want to get a good job. And the only way to achieve that is to make sure that people
are learning. Not just when they are children but as they get older, their skills can be
renewed. We also need to make sure that we don't leave anybody behind, and don't create a
society with those who have these skills and those who do not have them. The hope is that
the Internet can bring with it the tools for learning, to make learning more efficient,
more fun, better for everybody, by providing lots and lots of information, perhaps by
creating a whole set of on-line books, on-line text materials, written by the best experts
in the world who can help teachers reach the students better, and so that people at home
can take courses over the Internet from anywhere in the world, downloaded electronically,
and keep increasing their skills. There are a lot of possibilities but I have to say we
are at the very early stages of applying the technology to learning, but I believe it is
critical that we do so.
Question 14
What's your opinion about multimedia capacity of the network in the next years?
Answer
Well, the Internet computers are happy to transmit anything that is ones and zeros: And
what is very nice is that more and more everything is digitised, not just the bank
records, not just documents, but now speech is digitised, music is digitised, teachers are
digitised, videos are digitised, and all of them can now be accessed electronically using
the Internet, using browsers and Web servers. And over time, we will learn how to use
these new multimedia capabilities to produce a lot more entertainment, to do publishing
maybe in many more creative ways, so that you can have articles that makes text where it
is appropriate with a lot of pictures, with movie clips, video clips, maybe archives, lots
of footnotes that send you with a lot of depth, and hopefully we'll learn to apply all
that so we entertain and we educate at the same time.
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