By Martha Lagace, Staff Writer, HBS Working Knowledge
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A shopping tour of the future, confessions of a "recovering techno-utopian," and advice for governments, users and businesses were the topics of reflection by three business leaders who presented keynotes at the IS2K conference: Jerry A. Greenberg of Sapient, Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Andy Grove of Intel.
In his shopping tour of the future, Greenberg, the Co-Chairman and Co-CEO of the "Internet solutions" company Sapient, described a future profoundly influenced by handheld wireless devices. These devices would let ordinary consumers dip into the supply chain and personalize each transaction according to their own preferences. Such active participation by consumers would alter the balance of power in buying and selling, he said.
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As an example, Greenberg cited the typical experience nowadays of shopping in a supermarket. "The current supermarket model is a Stalinist, socialist approach," Greenberg declared. "You could be Bill Gates and you would still stand in line."
In Greenberg's vision of the future, a supermarket that received a shipment of peaches, for instance, would alert customers in the store to that fact via a beep on their wireless devices. Customers could then bid on a price if they wanted to. E-ink and e-paper would change signs in the stores in real time. Such indications of real-time demand, Greenberg noted, would completely transform the way business is conducted since power would be literally in the hands of consumers.
The biggest obstacles ahead, he said, are not so much in technology as in systems, processes and behavior. To the challenge from a member of the audience that the picture Greenberg described was "dystopian," he allowed that his vision of a possible future posed a larger social question.
"The key issue is trust," Greenberg said. "What is trust in buying and selling, and what does it mean to brands? As consumers, will we be happy along this journey? The Internet is allowing profound information on what customers really value. From my perspective, we've yet to see the real value of what's ahead of us."
Confessions of a Recovering Techno-Utopian
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In his keynote speech that opened the conference, Mitch Kapor—founder of Lotus Development Corporation and now a "practicing venture capitalist"—described his own growing ambivalence about the Internet. He also considered the need for people and institutions to take serious steps in overcoming what he called the ‘Net's lack of "emotional bandwidth."
As a self-described "recovering techno-utopian," Kapor noted that his first experiences with the earliest forms of the Internet, years ago, had left him enchanted with the idea of virtual communities. He still experiences such moments of enchantment, he said, referring to a recent newspaper article about fisherman in southern India who use the Internet to get accurate weather forecasts for the first time.
"There are some things about the Internet that you have to love if you have any kind of beating human heart," Kapor said.
On the flip side, his own average experience on the Internet, he lamented, makes him feel more and more disillusioned. "I feel increasingly like I'm subjected to involuntary detention in a series of strip malls in cyberspace that are ugly, banner-filled, privacy-invading, and doing their best to reduce me, a human being, to a consumer. … How the heck did that happen?"
The dominant force on the Internet today, he continued, is the reinvention of business at all levels, on a worldwide basis, to take advantage of this medium. "The idea that it connects us together as individuals and as a society … is, I can tell you from my own experience, an entirely irrelevant and not even a legitimate question to ask in the discourse of business."
Kapor noted that the "emotional bandwidth" of the Internet is limited because the 'Net requires people to rely on text to express themselves. "The written word is a wonderful medium in the hands of Shakespeare," Kapor pointed out. "But it is difficult for most people to express their meaning, their intentions and their feelings. It strips away body language, nuance, things that give communication their character, not just their content.
"But if we understand that the lack of emotional bandwidth is something to be concerned about, we're not helpless."
Funds must be found, and research must be conducted, to integrate voice, highly realistic computer graphics, and devices so communication can be simple and natural. Even if this concept doesn't turn out, Kapor said, the whole idea of overcoming limitations of emotional bandwidth ought to be part of the future.
"If we want to have a world where we use the Internet to help connect people together in much more fundamental and meaningful ways," Kapor added, "we really need to be willing to take risks to try some things that just may sound crazy. And we need to be able to form and maintain institutions to do that kind of work."
"First, do no harm"
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As a founder of Intel in 1968, current Chairman of the Board Andy Grove drew from a great depth of experience in technology when he told the Harvard audience, "The Internet has brought as big a change as I've ever seen."
His mission in his keynote, he said, was to ask everyone to think about what it will take to continue the Internet's beneficial effects and dodge the bad. These remarks were framed around three sets of recommendations:
To governments: "First, do no harm."
To individuals: "Embrace that which confounds you most."
To businesses: "Do more. Talk less."
So far, he noted, the U.S. government has successfully avoided several pitfalls. There is no Department of the Internet, no Federal Internet Commission, and no bit tax. For individuals, Grove noted, "Access alone is meaningless. Education and a culture of participation are the only barriers there are."
Some of his strongest opinions were reserved for business, however. Grove and some of his colleagues, he said, have an "uncomfortable feeling" that current wealth creation in technology is not accompanied by a corresponding creation of real value.
"We need to go back to the basics and realize that a feature of a software product is not a software product," Grove said. "A feature of a service is not a service. It is [as though] the mentality of today was applied to word processing in the personal computing era. Instead of getting supplied with word processing software, you would buy a feature from text-editor.com, another from spellcheck.com, another one from merge.com, and you would be left with the task of assembling a word processor."
Such segmented activities will ultimately be self-limiting for companies, he predicted.
"People are looking for complete benefits, not features," Grove said. "They will rebel, particularly when those features are self-serving from the company standpoint, when they represent a potential way for the company to make a presence, and when they do not solve real business problems.
"The question I would love for every company that wants to participate in the Internet space to ask itself is: ‘Are you providing a complete benefit or are you providing a small feature? And, are you solving real business problems with your product?'"