The information society should serve all of its citizens, not only the technically sophisticated and economically privileged.
The software is where the magic is. If you're going to have all this power be simple enough, appealing enough and cool enough, it's going to be because the software is right.
Whenever you have multiple devices including multiple PCs that you want to share information with, it's always been a bit complicated.
This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.
If you count E-mail, I'm on the Internet all day, every day.
Virtually every company will be going out and empowering their workers with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes, thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before.
Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren't easy questions.
Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have - whether it's something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.
I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
I didn't used to wear a watch. Now I have a SPOT watch, which I wear all the time.
