Comments on: The Coming Information Utility, Now Gone and Everywhere

By: adapting to disruptive change « Evolving Economic Entities « Innovation Leadership Network

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:40:40 +0000

[...] my friend Mike pointed out, they got at least a little bit better at forecasting what was coming. Probably more importantly, they have been an innovative firm right from the start. [...]

By: Chris Barts

Chris Barts — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:56:43 +0000

The distinction between individuals connecting to centralized computers using terminals and individuals having their own computers hooked to a common network is huge. It is the difference between an organization being able to censor things like PGP and governments having to deal with the inevitability of good encryption being released into the wild. It is the difference between a network with arbitrary decency standards and a network with Rotten.com. People make too much effort to give the benefit of the doubt to predictions, sometimes twisting the plain meaning of words to make something ‘fit’. Giving such benefit to predictions of an ‘Information Utility’ is a prime example. Such thinking distorts history by imputing ideas (like the Internet) to people who never had them (like Western Union, or Andrei Sakharov) while distorting the ideas they did have.

By: Jason Scott

Jason Scott — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:19:32 +0000

Yeah, part of where I’m going with this is that this idea was bubbling like mad for decades, and it was finally pulled off. Sometimes people forget some ideas are inevitable. The exact details, of course, shift. Fascinating!

By: Philippe Latulippe

Philippe Latulippe — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:45:35 +0000

Here’s a similar kind of quote from Andrei Sakharov, one of the physicist who developed the Soviet atomic bomb.

“I foresee a universal information system (UIS), which will give everyone access at any given moment to the contents of any book that has ever been published or any magazine or any fact. The UIS will have individual miniature-computer terminals, central control points for the flood of information, and communication channels incorporating thousands of artificial communications from satellites, cables, and laser lines. Even the partial realization of the UIS will profoundly affect every person, his leisure activities, and his intellectual and artistic development. Unlike television…the UIS will give each person maximum freedom of choice and will require individual activity. But the true historic role of the UIS will be to break down the barriers to the exchange of information among countries and people.” (Saturday Review/ World, 24 August 1974.)

While it was written many years after the Western Union document, I think it’s amazing because he manages to foresee the social and political impact it would have.

By: Chris Barts

Chris Barts — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:04:39 +0000

Well, Bell Labs, Honeywell, et al. didn’t have any better luck with Multics. The whole notion of a centralized ‘information utility’ similar to a power utility or, back then, a phone utility was doomed by, first, the inability to scale 1960s hardware to meet that requirement and, later, by the rise of more ad-hoc networks, including UUCP, BITNET, Fidonet, and others, all running on hardware and software that was significantly behind the state of the art even then.
In short, the low-end killed the high-end much like weeds might choke out the beginnings of a rose garden. Long live weeds!