Computers: Just another commodity?
Published: 03 Oct 2003 10:54 BST
I think where the amazement is going to be is in the ability to do things with information and content that was never possible before. There are huge opportunities for search technologies to deal with information, and they are increasing in orders of magnitude over the next decade. If you take something as simple as sensor devices, like RFIDs (radio frequency identification), and, if Wal-Mart put RFIDs on every item on their store, it would generate something like 7.5 million terabytes of new data every day. So as we move to real-time systems and sensors and robots, and all of these things that have been kind of like experiments over the last decade are turned into things that can be productised over the next 10 to 15 years, the world of real-time information, and how it becomes incorporated into more parts of their lives, is going to be where the amazement is going to take place.
At Apple, you were in some ways perceived as the person with "next big thing" ideas. And, in some ways, people say you were ahead of your time with the Newton. Where do you see the next big thing?
I am personally interested in high-definition television, and multichannel VPNs (virtual private networks) are going to be very practical within the decade. I think we're going to see a lot of innovation in the areas of television being reinvented, a huge opportunity with mobile wireless. In fact, I think wireless is the biggest landscape for innovation and business creation. I am personally involved in two mobile wireless companies, and I can see that while we are successful in what we are doing, we're at the very beginning of the possibilities.
In the wireless world, especially Wi-Fi, how do you think the industry will make some real money out of it? On the hardware side, the profit margins are slim and, on the services side, we haven't seen a highly lucrative business model yet.
I think a good way to think of Wi-Fi is to think back to the 1970s, with the introduction of citizens band radio. And what citizens band radio did was it whetted people's appetite to the possibility that mobile communications could be available to everybody. But citizens band radio wasn't the business that ever got commercialised into a business success. What became the real commercial implementation of that dream was the cellular telephone industry. That started off originally with analogue and today has moved into mobile digital services with PCS and either GSM or CDMA platforms. I suspect the same thing will happen with Wi-Fi. It's whetting our appetite as to what you can do with things like 802.11A, B and G. But I believe there will be a follow-on generation of even more interesting technologies that will increase quality of service and add real value in terms of the security to work in a wireless world and the ability to extend the range. Everything from last-mile solutions for fixed-base wireless, to all kinds of mobile wireless applications, will be the descendents of what we know today as Wi-Fi.
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