INTERVIEW:
Question 1
How do you, and IBM in general, see the Internet developing?
Answer
The Internet is moving in many directions. The really important objective is to create a
fully networked society. We want to connect everything. We want to be able to reach
everybody. As you can imagine that's a very cosmic undertaking and is going to take us
quite a while to get it done. But I believe that in 1996 we had the realisation that the
Internet in addition to being very exciting could be used for very useful applications in
the world of business. I think that in 1997 we will see a continuation of people thinking:
What are the implications of doing business in a fully networked society? The Internet is
all about creating a fully networked society. The future of the Internet is to help us
create that fully networked society for everybody, for every business, for every
educational institution, for every research institution, for every healthcare institution.
This is a major transformation of society, and I would say the future of the Internet is
to help us all make that transformation.
Question 2
So let's see where we stand now. What is the situation now in 1996? What are the positive
sides and the negative sides of Internet?
Answer
I think the most positive thing in 1996 is that people in business realised how useful it
is. The Internet came out of the world of universities and research labs and then
businesses embraced it. And 1996 was I think a major transition point where every single
business had to decide what is the implication of a fully connected society today. That's
very positive. What is negative? Well, the negative is perhaps the other side of that
coin. That when something becomes very hot, very quickly, you get a lot of hype, you get a
lot of people promising too many things that they have no idea how to do. You worry about
things like security, you worry about things like is the material suitable for children,
you worry about waiting too long for the material to come over the network. But I believe
each one of those issues will get solved. It's just a matter of time.
Question 3
There is a lot of discussion about browsers. It seems that the position of IBM is careful.
Why is this and what is going to be the development of the technology of the process? What
are they going to use?
Answer
What happens is that when you have a very exciting, complicated objective like bringing
applications to a fully networked world, you don't want to get involved in a little
skirmish over any one technology because those skirmishes take energy and they take away
from the broader objective. The browsers are very important. They are the equivalent of
getting a dial tone on the telephone so that you can connect to everybody. The evolution
of the browser is going to be that all kinds of devices will have browsers in them because
we want to connect all kinds of devices. Every PC, every personal computer, every
workstation, but increasingly, consumer electronic devices like television, set-top boxes,
maybe your electric meter being connected over the Internet. So the browser is the way we
connect to people and things.
Question 4
In this perspective, which are the key applications?
Answer
We will see a whole variety of applications. Some applications are going to be connecting
everybody in the business. We tend to call them collaborative connections. Our Lotus
technology is the premier technology to make those happen. Then you can extend those
applications not just to the employees of the business, but you can now reach out to your
suppliers, to your agents, so you're creating a virtual business with all your partners.
Then, of course, there is the world of electronic commerce, of creating a marketplace on
the Internet where things get sold and people come looking for things to buy. And we are
seeing more and more electronic commerce applications. And then there is a lot of
information that is useful to people - newspapers, magazines, even video increasingly made
available over the Internet - so you get a lot of content, and that will happen more and
more.
Question 5
At the beginning of the interview, we mentioned the Intranet and the Extranet. Can you
explain to us how they work?
Answer
I really feel the difference between Intranet, Extranet and the public Internet depends
who you are trying to reach. If you're trying to each just everybody in your business,
it's a private Intranet. If you're trying to reach not just the people in your business
but also your partners and suppliers, people are beginning to use the word, Extranet,
although very few people use that term, and I hope maybe even fewer will use it in the
future. We need fewer terms, not more terms. And then when you want to reach everybody,
that's when you use the public Internet term. But I think that what's important is that
you use the identical standards whether you want to reach people inside the business or
whether you want to reach people across the ocean in a whole other continent. That is
progress. Just like with the telephone, the same telephone you can pick up and you can
dial somebody in the office next to you, and with the same telephone you can dial
international to somebody 12,000 miles away. The Internet and Intranet are letting us have
that kind of connectivity. That's what is exciting. It doesn't matter what we call it.
Question 6
We spoke about the browser war and you said it's not so important. What is your
impression? Is there a sort of struggle between Microsoft on the one side and on the
others on the other side? Now we have the announcement of the 100 percent pure Java
campaign, and once again it seems that Microsoft is on one side and Netscape and IBM, Sun
and Oracle are on the other. Is this situation somehow a technical one?
Answer
I really believe, I hope, that it's temporary, because I think that to really achieve the
objective of having a fully connected society you need everybody to use the same
standards. You don't want people to have to think, OK, which kind of telephone do I pick
up? Do I pick up a red telephone to call north and a blue telephone to call south? It's
better for everybody to agree to say, one telephone can call north and south. Now, you
know, people are human, companies get greedy, but eventually the free market tends to
force a discipline where you have to come to terms with reality. We had to do it when IBM
adopted standards. I think Microsoft is increasingly doing that as they are adopting
standards. Maybe it's taking them a little longer, but I'm hopeful that they will also
embrace these standards.
Question 7
About the Infosage project, can you explain why IBM abandoned it?
Answer
There were a couple of reasons why we felt we shouldn't do the Infosage project the way we
were doing it. Infosage was a project that allowed consumers to be able to ask for
information on a specific subject to be delivered to them, let's say twice a day. And then
it would go searching all kinds of information sources over the networks and deliver that
information. There were two problems with that. Number one, the people who owned the
content, -not IBM, it was news agencies, magazines and newspapers - were not happy having
that content delivered with an IBM brand. So there was a struggle where they said: Look,
let me deliver the content directly. And we have a separate service for that called
Infomarket that we are still continuing. That was point number one: it put us in conflict
with our customers. Point number two, IBM is very good at selling to businesses, to
institutions like governments, hospitals, universities, research labs. Our strength is not
selling to consumers directly. Infosage was supposed to address consumers directly. And we
decided that we had so much to do that we should become very focused. If we are really
good football players, let's stick to football instead of also wanting to play basketball,
because it takes a lot of hard work to be a world-class football player. So it was a
combination of those decisions that caused us to stop the Infosage service. We are now
going to be selling the technology from Infosage to companies that want to put together
similar services themselves. So we are not stopping the technology or the product; it's
just we will sell it and other people will build this service under their brand and bring
it to market directly.
Question 8
It seem like five or six years ago everybody was going to be computing. What is happening
now to this technology? What is the future?
Answer
I think that you reach a point in every technology where the technology is so good that
nobody cares about it, because they only care about it when it doesn't work. Right now, if
you go to buy a car, the engines are so good, you don't worry about the engine. The brakes
are so good, you don't worry about the brakes. What do you do? You close the door to see
how it sounds, you smell the leather, you want a very exciting driving experience. I think
that's happening in computers where increasingly we all assume the technology is good and
it works. And now the question is, What are you going to do with the technology? What
exciting applications are you bringing to market? I think that's what's happening. And
that's inevitable as the technology matures and the only time you notice it is when it
doesn't work.
Question 9
A philosophical question. Talking of the future of the Internet and how it moves so fast,
what will it be like next year? What are your ideas or visions or dreams in ten years
time?
Answer
Well, here is the dream. Assume that everybody in Italy is connected over a network, how
will government deliver services to people differently? How will there be a more efficient
society? What kind of education can you do when all children have access to great
information sources around the world, where teachers get the most expert help around the
world and can put together very exciting lessons? How about healthcare? If somebody has a
problem in a very remote corner of Sicily, they can be consulting an expert in Milan
because they are interacting over a network and the magnetic resonance image gets
transmitted over the network and the expert is looking at it as if he were next door. How
will telemedicine make advances? I really think the vision should all be: How will society
become a better society as a result of getting connected? And that's where I hope all of
our visions and fantasies and hard work will go.
Question 10
What are your fears about the world of technology?
Answer
My biggest fear is that the technology we are talking about is so good that the people who
master it have tremendous power. Putting information in the hands of people is the same as
"power to the people". Now what happens to those people who don't learn enough
to take advantage of all that information; what jobs can they get and the biggest fear is
the gap between those people who do the proper learning to take advantage of it and people
who do not get further and further behind. And I say: Society, we need to pay a lot of
attention not to leave anyone behind. We need to use technology itself to help bring
education to everybody so they too can become powerful and can become productive and do
lot of useful work and have a high standard of living.
Question 11
So you think that it's necessary to educate people to use technology.
Answer
I really believe that the main education is not in the technology but it is: How do you
interact with all this information?. Because it is not the computer, it is the rivers of
information that are flowing at you. What skills do you need to handle that? They are very
classical skills: you need to be very good at reading, you need to be very good at writing
because there is going to be a lot of interaction between people and if you can write very
short simple messages everybody understand. People like to read what you write instead of
reading boring long messages. I think that reasoning becomes more important so that you
can quickly make sense of all information and then I think that team work, because
increasingly in a network society you will collaborate with a lot of people .You will be
perhaps designing a car with people of different parts of the world that you have to
collaborate. Those are civilisation kind of skills, working well with people becomes very
important. So I'd put the emphasis on those very classic human skills and the technology
will take care of itself.
Question 12
Everything now moves so quickly, It seems we have such short time intervals to react when
reasoning in different kinds of ways needs time. What do you think?
Answer
Well, I think the pressure of time is a very real problem in our society today. It's
already a problem now, let alone in the future. I think that it's a skill we will learn,
including what things you can reason quickly and make decisions. Perhaps because of
experience, you're able to make a decision. Also, something that's very nice over networks
is that you can ask for help. You can be sitting alone at 3.00 a.m. trying to solve a
problem, and if you don't know what to do, you can send e-mail to a friend, and when they
wake up, maybe they can help you. So people who are very successful in this environment
tend not to be isolated. They tend to ask for help and in that way with their friends and
their colleagues they solve problems better.
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