I will be the first home user for one of the most unusual electronic features in my house. The product is a database of more than a million still images, including photographs and reproductions of paintings. If you’re a guest, you’ll be able to call up portraits of presidents, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiing in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965, or reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, on screens throughout the house.
A few years ago I started a small company, now called Corbis, in order to build a unique and comprehensive digital archive of images of all types. Corbis is a digital stock agency for a large variety of visual material—ranging from history, science, and technology to natural history, world cultures, and fine arts. It converts these images into digital form using high-quality scanners. The images are stored at high resolution in a database that has been indexed in inventive ways that will make it easy for someone to find exactly the right image. These digital images will be available to commercial users such as magazine and book publishers as well as to individual browsers. Royalties are paid to the image owners. Corbis is working with museums and libraries, as well as a large number of individual photographers, agencies, and other archives.
I believe quality images will be in great demand on the highway. This vision that the public will find image-browsing worthwhile is obviously totally unproven. I think the right interface will make it appealing to a lot of people.
If you can’t decide what you feel like seeing, you will be able to scan randomly and the database will show you various images until something interests you. Then you’ll be able to explore related pictures in depth. I’m looking forward to being able to scan and to asking for “sailboats” or “volcanoes” or “famous scientists”
Although some of the images will be of artworks, that doesn’t mean I believe that reproductions are as good as the originals. There’s nothing like seeing the real work. I believe that easy-to-browse image databases will get more people interested in both graphic and photographic art.
In the course of my business travels, I’ve been able to spend some time in museums seeing the originals of some great art. The most interesting piece of “art” I own is a scientific notebook, kept by Leonardo da Vinci in the early 1500s. I’ve admired Leonardo since I was young because he was a genius in so many fields and so far ahead of his time. Even though what I own is a notebook of writings and drawings, rather than a painting, no reproduction could do it full justice.
Art, like most things, is more enjoyable when you know something about it. You can walk for hours through the Louvre, admiring paintings that are at best vaguely familiar, but the experience becomes much more interesting when there is someone knowledgeable walking with you. The multi-media document can play the role of guide, at home or in a museum. It can let you hear part of a lecture on a work given by the preeminent scholar on the subject. It can refer you to other works by the same artist or from the same period. You can even zoom in for a closer look. If multi-media reproductions make art more approachable, those who see the reproduction will want to see originals. Exposure to the reproductions is likely to increase rather than diminish reverence for real art and encourage more people to get out to museums and galleries.
A decade from now, access to the millions of images and all the other entertainment opportunities I’ve described will be available in many homes and will certainly be more impressive than those I’ll have when I move into my house in late 1996. My house will just be getting some of the services a little sooner.
I enjoy experimenting, and I know some of my concepts for the house will work out better than others. Maybe I’ll decide to conceal the monitors behind conventional wall art or throw the electronic pins into the trash. Or maybe I’ll grow accustomed to the systems in the house, or even fond of them, and wonder how I got along without them. That’s my hope.
11
RACE FOR THE GOLD
It seems as though every week some company or consortium announces it has won the race to build the information highway. Incessant hoopla about megamergers and bold investments has created a gold rush atmosphere—people and companies pressing headlong toward an opportunity, hoping to cross a finish line or stake a claim they believe will assure them of success. Investors seem enchanted with highway-related stock offerings. Media coverage of the race is unprecedented, especially considering that both the technology and the demand are unproven. This is quite different from the early, unchronicled days of the personal-computer industry. Today’s frenzy can be intoxicating, especially for those who hope to be contenders, but the truth is that in this race everyone is barely at the starting line.
When it finally is run, there will be many winners, some unexpected. One result of the California gold rush was the rapid economic development of the West. In 1848, only 400 settlers were drawn to California. Most were engaged in agriculture. Within one year the gold rush had attracted 25,000 settlers. A decade later, manufacturing was a much bigger part of California’s economy than gold production, and the state’s per capita wealth was the nation’s highest.
Over time, big money will be made with the right investment strategies. There are large numbers of very different sorts of companies jockeying for what they perceive will be the post position. And much of their jockeying is being covered as important news. In this chapter I’d like to try to put into perspective what’s going on.
In the rush to build the information highway, no one has seen any gold yet, and there’s a lot of investing to be done before anyone does. The investments will be driven by faith that the market will be large. Neither the full highway nor the market will exist until a broadband network has been brought to most homes and businesses. Before that can happen, the software platforms, applications, networks, servers, and information appliances that will make up the highway all have to be built and deployed. Many pieces of the highway won’t be profitable until there are tens of millions of users. Achieving that goal will require hard work, technical ingenuity, and money. Today’s frenzy is helpful in this regard, because it encourages investment and experimentation.
No one yet knows for sure what the public wants from the information highway. The public itself can’t know, because it hasn’t had experience with video-capable interactive networks and applications. Some early technology has been tried, but there have been only a few such trials. They have offered movies, some shopping, and a lot of novelty, which soon wears off. As a result, all that has really been learned so far is that limited interactive systems generate limited results. It will be impossible to get much of a sense of the highway’s real potential until dozens of new applications have been built. However, it’s tough to justify building applications without confidence in the market. Until at least one credible trial proves that the revenue generated can justify the fixed costs of the system, everyone who insists his company will spend billions building the information highway to connect it to homes is posturing. My view is that the highway won’t be a sudden, revolutionary creation but that the Internet, along with evolution in the PC and PC software, will guide us step by step to the full system.
Some posturing is unfairly elevating expectations and contributing to the excesses of Information Highway Frenzy. A surprising number of people are speculating about the direction technology will take. Some of these conjectures ignore practicality or preferences the public has already demonstrated or are unrealistic about how soon the pieces will come together. Everyone should be free to theorize, but speculation suggesting that the full information highway’s major impact on consumers will come before the turn of the century is flat wrong.