" In every industrial transformation, businesses prosper by using the
defining abundance of their era to alleviate the defining scarcity.
Today this challenge implies a commanding moral imperative: to use
Internet bandwidth in order to stop wasting the customer's time. Stop
the callous cost of queues, the insolence of cold calls, the wanton
eyeball pokes and splashes of billboards and unwanted ads, the constant
drag of lowest-common-denominator entertainments, the lethal tedium of
unneeded travel, the plangent buffeting of TV news and political
prattle, the endless temporal dissipation in classrooms, waiting rooms,
anterooms, traffic jams, toll booths and assembly lines, through the
impertinent tyranny of unneeded and afterwards ignored submission of
forms, audits, polls, waivers, warnings, legal pettifoggery.
All these affronts once were tolerable in an age when the
customer's time seemed abundant--an available economic externality in an
economy of material scarcity. All are intolerable in an age of
compounding abundance, pressing down on the span of life as the
irreducible scarcity.
For all this abusive waste of the most precious resource, the
remedy is the Net. Businesses must use its defining abundance--MIPS,
bits and gigahertz--to redress the residual scarcity of time. A key way
to save time is to economize on space--geography. In practical terms,
there is only one way to collapse time and space together.
That is to relegate more and more of the routine functions of life
to microchips, where room expands as space contracts, and where
operations cycle in nanoseconds, and then to interconnect the chips
through the technologies of the speed of light. This is the promise of
the Internet and it will keep the Giant Peach aloft and ascendant in the
new global economy of bandwidth abundance."
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Famous words from an article by George Gilder about eating peaches in Jan. 1998. |
