The 1990s will bring more change in information technology than the world has seen in the last 30 years, according to John Young, outgoing president and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co. People have been talking about an information age for a long time. It’s our very clear view that in the 1990s, this will become a reality, he told a meeting of the Pacific Economic Co-operation Council in San Francisco. He highlighted three factors that he says will drive the change in the information environment. The first is the accelerating growth in the power of computer hardware which he sees leading to massively powerful low-cost computing. Over the last 30 years, the price-performance of computers has improved by 25% to 30% a year. That means every two and a half to three years, you can buy the same computer for half the price, he said. But in recent years, the annual increase in the ratio has grown to 70% and was likely to continue at that rate for the rest of the decade, he said. He believes there will likely be a corresponding increase in the capability of software this decade with the introduction of computer-aided softwareengineering tools. These new user interfaces and expert systems will make computers easy to use even to the technically unsophisticated, making information technology literally as pervasive as electricity, he suggested. A second driving force is the movement of telecommunications to all-digital technology, leading to the convergence of data communications and telecommunications, and the third was the trend is towards information appliances. Instead of being general-purpose computers, they would be geared to specific tasks. For the individual, the new technologies would remove a lot of the tedium of work: engineers would not have to spend much time taking measurements, since the process would be automated. Employees would not have to spend time looking for information, since they would have a special software agent which would search world databases at night to assemble the information they needed, ready for when they came to work in the morning, he forecast – although there is a big danger in that last concept that few people as yet seem to recognise. The problem is that the system will only look for what you ask it to find – and the most valuable pieces of information are the ones you didn’t know were of any interest until you saw them, and systems that are designed to cover all bases will find loads of junk.
