Convergence, ambient technology, and success in innovation

Stanford professor Terry Winograd was a founder and national president of Computer Professionals for Responsibility, and is currently on sabbatical at Google. He studied natural language processing under Seymour Papert at the MIT AI Lab. He has also worked at Xerox PARC.

Winograd: "Pre-Mosaic, the Web was uninteresting because it didn't have pictures. Transferring text and following links to other pieces of text seemed very academic. Putting images in completely changed the feel.

... The idea that you can index billions of pages and look for a word and get what you want is quite a trick.

... I always was interested in the question of how language worked. So, in that sense, I was a linguist. ... But I was never interested in subtleties about pronoun movement in Swahili."

Winograd to Larry Page, of Google: "There's a lot of stuff you guys are doing that has general applicability to human-computer interaction. It's not just about search engines. It's about how you interact with systems."

Winograd: "[I want to look at Google] from the perspective of what it can tell us about how people interact with systems in general and how might that be applied outside of search engines.

... Great innovations happen from time to time in history, but they're not something you can just will into being.

The explosion in computer interconnectivity, while providing great benefits, also poses enormous risks. Terrorists or hostile foreign states could launch computer-based attacks on critical systems to severely damage or disrupt national defense or other critical operations.

After reviewing the president's plan for homeland security, GAO found that many challenges remain. Among them:

Corning, the world's largest maker of fiber-optic cable, posted a quarterly net loss of $370 million due to weak spending in the telecommunications sector (half of Corning's revenue), and said more cuts in its work force or facilities may be necessary.

"At first blush, it certainly doesn't look pretty. The company continues to lose money and the actual performance [as opposed to what?] in their core telecom business remains very weak."

[Sales will continue to slip, more cuts necessary, noncore assets must be sold. Profitability to be achieved in 2003 at any cost.]

AT&T announced quarterly financial results yesterday that it said modestly exceeded analysts' expectations, amid signs that the trends that have devastated parts of its business, if not getting better, are at least not growing worse.

Both AT&T's consumer and business-services operations are still shrinking because of continued weakness in the company's core long-distance telephone market.

CEO: "Given ongoing weakness in the economy and instability among some players in the telecommunications industry, I'm pleased with our second-quarter results. We continue to execute with purpose and integrity."

AT&T would have to assume the risk of trying to sell billions of dollars' worth of shares in Time Warner Cable at a time when the stock market generally, and cable stocks in particular, are taking heavy losses.

Shortly after BellSouth, the nation's No. 3 local phone company, sent its stock plunging yesterday by saying it would fail to meet its financial targets for 2002, one analyst released a report titled, "It's Official -- There Is No Place to Hide."

In some ways, the pronouncement was as startling as it was apt. While the carriers fought each other and CLECs withered, RBOCs could sit back with their near-monopolies and reap growth, profits and the adulation of investors.

Or so the story went.

The Bells' problems keep mounting.

Asked about growth prospects, a Verizon rep said, "We see long-term growth on the wireless side, and also a great opportunity to offer wireless services to our enterprise customers."

Lucent announced a $7.91B loss for the fiscal third quarter and 7,000 more layoffs yesterday, adding another chapter to the seemingly unending tale of the telecommunications industry's woes.

Scott Cleland: "It's bad, and there's no cavalry coming."

Nortel believed its market had bottomed out and its fortunes would soon turn up. CEO Patricia Russo: "Like many others, we were wrong."

Jeff Kagan: "This isn't going to be a ripple on a pond. It's a tidal wave from a boulder."

Scott Cleland: "This is a case of lose-lose. It's like a virus that gets spread to everyone. Suppliers get shortchanged. People who do business with them get shortchanged. A lot of bad debt will get absorbed."

Meta Group: "This is going to be the big event that we're going to look back on and say 'That was the turning point.'"