By Larry Bernard
The future of the Internet no longer is driven by technology but by economics, making it an essential part of the industrial landscape that will reshape the way business is done, an Internet expert said on campus last week.
"The Internet will actually touch every single vertical industry that uses technology, because it is as essential as paper and pen, as essential as computing. It's an essential utility in higher education, aerospace and automobile industries already," said Cornell alumnus William L. Schrader, president and chief executive officer of PSINet, an Internet provider. "It will have a tremendous impact economically. It really doesn't matter what the technology is. But the economics are there. If you look at Madison Avenue, the whole advertising industry has changed in the last two years as a result."
Schrader was the keynote speaker at Cornell's annual engineering conference April 12-13, titled "This Is IT: Information Technology at Cornell and Beyond," sponsored by the College of Engineering and the Cornell Society of Engineers. The conference, chaired by Karl Miller '64, featured talks by Cornell faculty in information technology and presentations by industrial experts as well.
An alumnus of the Class of 1974, Schrader worked in Cornell's synchrotron and then helped found the Theory Center before moving on to NYSERNet, a network to develop high-speed links among institutions in New York state, on to Syracuse University where he helped found the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, and then on to start his own company. He has been gaining notoriety in the popular media recently as one of the new "Internet moguls."
Schrader's company provides connections for businesses and industry. Retailers are getting on and advertisers are logging in, he said during an interview prior to his banquet address. "The motive is to have a marketing presence in a whole new media of conveyance of information. The Internet allows people to communicate rapidly worldwide. It has more impact than any conference anywhere in the world, because you have an ongoing conference."
Could it be just a fad? Not likely, Schrader asserts. "Our customers never leave. Businesses never quit. That tells me it's becom
ing essential. In fact, no business that's ever been connected to the Internet disconnects and goes away."
The future? Schrader hesitates to predict five years hence. "The Internet, even in three years, will be a standard for business connectivity. There will not be a single business in America that doesn't have a Web page and electronic mail address, absolutely. Look for 2 million Web pages within two years."
Also addressing conference participants was John Hopcroft, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering. A computer scientist whose research includes information capture and access, Hopcroft addressed the conference luncheon at the Statler Hotel on Friday.
Information technology, he said, has not yet matured. "It has to do with how you think about the technology," he said. "For example, if you think about fractional horsepower electric motors . . . you don't think of it as motors. You think of it as hair dryers. You think of it in terms of its function. We still, today, think of computers as computers, rather than in terms of their function."
He said the average home has more than 100 fractional horsepower electric motors. "We're nowhere near to approaching 100 computers in the home today, but it is something I predict is going to happen," the dean said.
Two other trends also are key to the future of information technologies, he said: communications and computers are coming together, and the cost of digital storage is dropping. But, "this notion that through the World Wide Web we will really have at our fingertips all the information in the world, I'm not so sure of that," he said. "We haven't even addressed the cost of maintaining a Web page. Having a Web page is one of those activities we used to do in other ways. The Web has not changed fundamentally the way we provide information."
Information technologies also will have an effect on the economy, particularly in the service industry, Hopcroft said. "The service economy will lose much of its labor force. A whole host of jobs may just all disappear," he said, alluding to wireless information devices that will get a traveler through airline reservations, into a rental car and checked into a hotel without requiring another person.
The cost of memory is dropping, he said, which will make information technology available to a wider group of people. "You will be able to save every piece of information that crosses your desk, and the cost each year will be constant," Hopcroft said. "The ways to access this information will be developed."