Notes on Gates: The Road Ahead
Chapter 6-7, Notes by Andrew Thomas
April 9, 2001

The content revolution

  1. Redefinition of the document.
    "The significant aspect of digital documents is the redefinition of the document itself (130)."
  2. Do digital documents really simplify? Do they generate less or more paper?
  3. Are multimedia documents valuable?
    "By the end of the decade a significant percentage of documents, even in offices, won’t be fully printable on paper. The document will be like a movie or song is today. You’ll be able to print out a two-dimensional view of its content, but that will be like reading a music score instead of listening to a recording (131)."
  4. Databases…dynamic content…information design
  5. The Gutenberg Analogy
    1. Inexpensive replication of information
    2. Concept of the "original" vs. the "copy" — W. Benjamin
    3. Authenticity
    4. What happens in a digital world? Also, what happens when the content is dynamic? Is there an original? What is authentic?
    5. Problem of "virtuality." What happens when content is intangible? What lasts?
    6. Rise in literacy
  6. The Stephen Hawkings example on page 139-140
    1. Ignores the exigencies of commercial success, assumes ineffable, unpredictable merit that magically results in success.
    2. Bill Gates hidden ideological agenda: the Divine Right of Microsoft.
  7. Commodification and the value of time. Couldn’t there by a new definition of value?
  8. End of chapter 6: the egalitarian hopes of cybercapitalism

 

Business on the Internet

  1. Redesigning nervous systems
  2. Improving productivity
    1. Increase production values, efficiencies, accuracies — not quality
    2. Decreases labor cost — Bill doesn’t mention this, except in a cryptic reference to low salaries in Greece.
  3. Customer service transactions (158). The computer as "third person" in phone calls. What happens when the computer is down?
  4. E-Mail
    1. Etiquette
    2. Personal use
    3. No mention of privacy
    4. Used in anti-trust case
  5. Microsoft inevitability
    1. Passive voice: "e-mail software is improving all the time (161)."
    2. Microsoft Giving Campaign — strategic examples
  6. Value of intranets
    1. Microsoft Anti-trust case
    2. Better ways of organizing information — Microsoft has always trailed here
  7. Videoconferencing
    1. Reduce transaction costs, but they only need to be reduced since people are so insulated
    2. Mediated by the network: new styles, techniques, interpersonal relations
    3. Synchronous communication linked to web pages (opportunity to upsell, which is lacking in current web catalogs.)
  8. "These electronic innovations…are ways of overcoming physical separation. As they become commonplace, they’ll change not just the way we work together but also the distinction we make between the workplace and everywhere else (174)."
    1. Telecommuting: opportunity for microwages
    2. Currently, this trend is slowing
    3. What does home and community mean? Do these arrangements increase or decrease alienation?
  9. Corporate organization
    1. Relationship between salaried and "outsourced" workers
    2. Flexibility in management, employment. The rise of personal "branding."
    3. Location not as important
  10. Ode to suburbanization (178)
    1. Broadband entertainment replaces the theatre
    2. Broadband socializing replaces visiting friends
    3. "Encouraging rural living" — like Silicon Valley?
    4. Inner cities will benefit from population reduction.