Making the Future Possible

by John Boyd

At a recent Tokyo conference on multimedia, sponsored by The Daily Yomiuri and NHK, Alan Kay, a vice president in R&D at Disney Corp., suggested that we haven't even begun to properly utilize multimedia technology, and probably won't until the next decade.

Kay, 57, bears impressive credentials to speak on the subject. He was involved in the design of the ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet. He was a researcher at Xerox's famed PARC (Palo Alto Research Center in California) in the 1970s, where he not only helped create the first personal computers, but also conceptualized the first notebook computer, the "dynabook" (dynamic book). And before his move to Disney, Kay was a research fellow at Apple, a multimedia pioneer.

The multimedia misunderstanding
According to Kay, there's a current misunderstanding of what multimedia is all about. It's not meant to be the integration of text, sound, graphics, and video, as most of us think - and which is what the commercialization of multimedia is currently focused on. Rather, insists Kay, multimedia is going to turn out to be something quite different over the next decade.

To help explain, he draws a parallel between the current era of multimedia and the decades immediately following the invention of the printing press. Nothing in the 50 years following the invention of the printing press, says Kay, really counted. "They were transitional years. There wasn't anything about them that resembled what happened for [the next] 400 or 500 years. And the first 50 years we're going through right now in personal computing and multimedia are not typical [of what will follow]."

So it's misleading, he warns, to extrapolate from what's currently happening in multimedia, "because it's almost certain to give us bad answers about what's going to happen in the future."

Another problem with our present thinking on multimedia, according to Kay, is that the technology has mostly been "imitating paper media" while at the same time "really trying to become as much like television as it possibly can." He suggests this television-aping phase could be "ruinous," and has been due to a lack of imagination on the part of a backwards-looking industry thinking only about "making money from [multimedia] now."

Let's get real
Such comments strike me as being ironically myopic, coming from a renowned visionary. How can Kay reasonably criticize the industry for making money on its investment in multimedia, when such returns make the kind of research he's doing possible? Besides, it's perfectly understandable that the industry is exploiting multimedia by creating products based on present know-how; these products help test the commercial potential of multimedia, and indicate what the next advances should be.

Let's get real here. IT (information technology) companies are in business first to make and sell attractive products and services at a profit, and only second to keep researchers dreaming happily about the future. Kay sounds like those curious critics found aplenty in academia, certain religious organizations, and liberal groups who decry "Big Business" for making profits, yet look expectantly to corporations for donations, contributions, and support for whatever, whenever.

It's debatable whether multimedia is "trying to become like television," given that the latter is characterized by its passivity and mass-appeal broadcasting. Multimedia's hyperlink and interactive components, not to mention new Internet-based "push" technologies facilitating individual customization of multimedia information, suggest it is evolving into something rather different.

Nevertheless, Kay insists we are wasting time in our current computer and multimedia endeavors. Instead of getting sidetracked going after a buck, we apparently should be inciting a revolution in multimedia that will open up a new dimension of computer usage, a dimension that we just can't see now because we are so blinded by commercial considerations.

I can't help thinking of all the great ideas PARC came up with in the 1970s, yet left to other companies to do the really hard work of turning into commercial hit products. It was Apple that engineered the graphical user interface into a reality with its Macintosh. Adobe made desktop publishing possible with its PostScript language. And 3Com, Sun Microsystems, and others have effectively exploited networking.

Commercialization of such ideas - not merely the ideas themselves - is what has brought the industry to where it is today. Such concepts may indeed have been revolutionary, but turning them into reality (that is, creating affordable and successful products) was accomplished through a series of risky steps, paid for through the sales of products based on the previous steps taken.

Kay's new-dimension stuff, too, may take a revolution in thought. But it will only be turned into reality if companies continue to profitably exploit today's technologies. It's those profits that make dreaming of the future possible.

John Boyd writes about revolting IT experiences for a number of publications, including TechWeb and the weekly Computer Corner column in the Japan Times. If you too want to rail against Big Business, you could try risking fail mail to contact him at 6840615@mcimail.com.

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