My Yahoo!The New Era
The computer age is over. Bandwidth and now "storewidth", (see sidebar below), eclipse the PC paradigm. PCs remain important but peripheral. After a cataclysmic global run of 30 years, the PC revolution has stiffened into an establishment. So swiftly and subliminally did this silicon tide pass through the economy that many analysts missed much of the motion until it stopped. Then they mistook its dotage for dynamism. It congealed so fast that its Mount Rushmore giants still walk and talk.
Contemplate the monumental frieze looming over the road ahead, which ends at a revolutionary shrine: Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steven Jobs of Apple, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove of Intel. Still very much around, they beam from magazine covers, iconize companies, orate at Davos and Comdex and publish books (Grove even writes his himself). Jobs launches new products in "insanely great" new tints and hues. Their totems tower over their time: Windows 2000, the millennial operating system launched with 30 million lines of code and a record-setting wild guess of 200,000 bugs; serried ranks of Pentium processors and support chips with scores of millions of transistors and instantly classical names, draining some 80 watts of power, enough to heat an igloo.
These Rushmore men, quick or dead, no longer shape the future. Computers no longer spearhead the economy. The action is elsewhere. The action is in the Telecosm.
Of course, the computer and the microchip remain enormously potent technologies. (So do the wheel, the steel mill and the nuclear power plant). Moore's law, which dictates a doubling of microchip performance, or a halving of its cost, every 18 to 24 months, is still in force. The process of ingraining intelligence into every aspect of our lives, mind into every machine, tool or toy, continues at an accelerating pace. The displacement of matter by mind in the economy, already the most powerful economic event in recorded history--just now appearing in economic data--has not yet begun to end.
The computer era--the age of the microchip, which I term the Microcosm--is ending not because it has failed or even because it has been fulfilled but because the Microcosm itself has given birth to a new era. It has enabled a new technology that is transforming culture, economics and politics far more thoroughly than the computer age did.
The computer era is falling before the one technological force that could surpass in impact the computer's ability to process information. That is communication, which is more essential to our humanity. Communication is the way we weave together a personality, a family, a business, a nation and a world. The Telecosm will make human communication universal, instantaneous, unlimited in capacity and free at the margins.
Because the computer made the creation and manipulation of information the central activity of the economy, this era has also been known as the information age. The great frustration of the computer era, however, has been the difficulty of communicating the information that we are told has become our most precious resource. Information is power, but information that cannot be readily moved is gridlock on the World Wide Wait. Immobile information makes our businesses larger, more static and hierarchical than they need to be. It makes our economies less flexible, our jobs less fulfilling, our lives less luminous with opportunity.
The Telecosm launches us beyond the copper cages of existing communications. The central event in technology over the last decade is a growing awareness that the information-bearing power of the electromagnetic spectrum--its bandwidth, that is, the range of frequencies and wavelengths available to carry signals--is not severely limited, as previously believed, but essentially infinite. From AM radio signals through microwaves to visible light--a band of frequencies millions of times the bandwidth of our 56 kilobit modems--the spectrum can carry usable signals.
An infinitude of potential bandwidth implies the endless multiplication of spectrum use and reuse. Such cellular technologies as CDMA allow the reuse of all available bandwidth in every cell, the sharing of cellular bandwidth among many users and the proliferation of local cells through the deployment of more antennas. The rise of Qualcomm, whose stock rose 27-fold in 1999, (see FORBES GLOBAL), and other related (GLOBAL story ), is based on this potential of ubiquitous waves.
The most powerful of all spectrum reuse technology is fiber optics. Every fiber-optic thread, only as thick as a human hair, can carry a thousand times more information on one path than all current wireless technologies put together. The basic measure of bandwidth is hertz, or wave cycles per second. The bandwidth of currently used wireless spectrum, running from AM radio to direct broadcast satellite, comes to a total of some 25 billion hertz (25 gigahertz), in scientific notation 25 x 10. The capacity of a fiber-optic cable--incorporating some 864 individual fibers--is measured in petahertz--10 waves per second. Petahertz signifies a million gigahertz.
Sidebar
Storewidth 2000
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Table
From the Microcosm to the Telecosm
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