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One simple way to think about computing, at any scale, is that it is comprised of

three things: computational capability, storage capability, and input/output

capability-the speed by which information is drawn in and out of the computer/storage

complexes. And all of these have been steadily increasing since the days of the first

bulky mainframes. This mutually reinforcing progress constitutes a significant

steroid. As a result of it, year after year we have been able to digitize, shape,

crunch, and transmit more words, music, data, and entertainment than ever before.

For instance, MIPS stands for "millions of instructions per second," and it is one

measure of the computational capability of a computer's microchips. In 1971, the Intel

4004 microprocessor produced .06 MIPS, or 60,000 instructions per second. Today's

Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition has a theoretical maximum of 10.8 billion instructions

per second. In 1971, the Intel 4004 microprocessor contained 2,300 transistors.

Today's Itanium 2 packs 410 million transistors. Meanwhile, inputting and outputting

data have leaped ahead at a staggering rate. At the speeds that disk drives operated

back in the early days of 286 and 386 chips, it would have taken about a minute to

download a single photo from my latest digital camera. Today I can do that in less

than a second on a USB 2.0 disk drive and a Pentium processor. The amount of stuff

you can now store to input and output "is off the charts, thanks to the steady advances

in storage devices," said Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief technology officer.

"Storage is growing exponentially, and this is really as much a factor in the

revolution as anything else." It's what is allowing all forms of content to become

digital and to some extent portable. It is also becoming cheap enough that you can

put massive amounts on even the personal devices people carry around with them. Five

years ago, no one would have believed that you would be able to sell iPods with 40

gigabytes ofstorage, capable of holding thousands of songs, for prices that teenagers

could afford. Now it's seen as ho-hum. And when it comes to moving all these bits

around, the computing world has been turbocharged. Advances in fiber optics will soon

allow a single fiber to carry 1 terabit per second. With 48 fibers in a cable, that's

48 terabits per second. Henry Schacht, the former CEO of Lucent, which specialized

in this technology, pointed out that with that much capacity, you could "transmit

all the

printed material in the world in minutes in a single cable. This means unlimited

transmitting capacity at zero incremental cost." Even though the speeds that Schacht

was talking about apply only to the backbone of the fiber network, and not that last

mile into your house and into your computer, we are still talking about a quantum

leap forward.

In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, I wrote about a 1999 Qwest commercial showing a

businessman, tired and dusty, checking in to a roadside motel inthe middle of nowhere.

He asks the bored-looking desk clerk whether they have room service and other

amenities. She says yes. Then he asks her whether entertainment is available on his

room television, and the clerk answers in a what-do-you-think-you-idiot monotone,

"All rooms have every movie ever made in every language, anytime, day or night." I

wrote about that back then as an example of what happens when you get connected to

the Internet. Today it is an example of how much you can now get disconnected from

the Internet, because in the next few years, as storage continues to advance and become

more and more miniaturized, you will be able to buy enough storage to carry many of

those movies around in your pocket.

Then add another hardware steroid to the mix: file sharing. It started with Napster

paving the way for two of us to share songs stored on each other's computers. "At

its peak," according to Howstuffworks.com, "Napster was perhaps the most popular

Website ever created. In less than a year, it went from zero to 60 million visitors

per month. Then it was shut down by a court order because of copyright violations,

and wouldn't re-launch until 2003 as a legal music-download site. The original Napster

became so popular so quickly because it offered a unique product-free music that you

could obtain nearly effortlessly from a gigantic database." That database was

actually a file-sharing architecture by which Napster facilitated a connection

between my computer and yours so that we could swap music files. The original Napster

is dead, but file-sharing technologyis still around and is getting more sophisticated

every day, greatly enhancing collaboration.

Finally, add one last hardware steroid that brings these technology breakthroughs

together for consumers: the steady breakthrough in multipurpose devices-ever smaller

and more powerful laptops, cell phones,

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you could practically feel the breath of the other parties to the videocon-ference,

when in fact half of us were in Santa Barbara and half were five hundred miles away.

Because DreamWorks is doing film and animation work all over the world, it felt that

it had to have a videoconferencing solution where its creative people could really

communicate all their thoughts, facial expressions, feelings, ire, enthusiasm, and

raised eyebrows. HP's chief strategy and technology officer, Shane Robison, told me

that HP plans to have these videoconferencing suites for sale by 2005 at a cost of

roughly $250,000 each. That is nothing compared to the airline tickets and wear and

tear on executives having to travel regularly to London or Tokyo for face-to-face

meetings. Companies could easily make one of these suites pay for itself in a year.

This level of videoconferencing, once it proliferates, will make remote development,

outsourcing, and off-shoring that much easier and more efficient.

And now the icing on the cake, the iibersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless.

Wireless is what will allow you take everything that has been digitized, made virtual

and personal, and do it from anywhere.

"The natural state of communications is wireless," argued Alan Cohen, the senior vice

president at Airespace. It started with voice, because people wanted to be able to

make a phone call anytime, from anyplace, to anywhere. That is why for many people

the cell phone is the most importantphone they own. By the early twenty-first century,

people began to develop that same expectation and with it the desire for data

communication-the ability to access the Internet, e-mail, or any business files

anytime, anywhere, using a cell phone, PalmPilot, or some other personal device. (And

now a third element is entering the picture, creating more demand for wireless

technology and enhancing the flattening of the earth: machines talking to machines

wirelessly, such as Wal-Mart's RFIDchips, little wireless devices that automatically

transmit information to suppliers' computers, allowing them to track inventory.)

In the early days of computing (Globalization 2.0), you worked in the office. There

was a big mainframe computer, and you literally had to walk over and get the people

running the mainframe to extract or input

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information for you. It was like an oracle. Then, thanks to the PC and the Internet,

e-mail, the laptop, the browser, and the client server, I could access from my own

screen all sorts of data and information being stored on the network. In this era

you were delinked from the office and could work at home, at the beach house, or in

a hotel. Now we are in Globalization 3.0, where, thanks to digitization,

miniaturization, virtualization, personalization, and wireless, I can be processing,

collecting, or transmitting voice or data from anywhere to anywhere-as an individual

or as a machine.

"Your desk goes with you everywhere you are now," said Cohen. And the more people

have the ability to push and pull information from anywhere to anywhere faster, the

more barriers to competition and communication disappear. All of a sudden, my business

has phenomenal distribution. I don't care whether you are in Bangalore or Bangor,

I can get to you and you can get to me. More and more, people now want and expect

wireless mobility to be there, just like electricity. We are rapidly moving into the

age of the "mobile me," said Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of

Motorola. If consumers are paying for any form of content, whether it is information,

entertainment, data, games, or stock quotes, they increasingly want to be able to

access it anytime, anywhere.

Right now consumers are caught in a maze of wireless technology offerings and

standards that are still not totally interoperable. As we all know, some wireless

technology works in one neighborhood, state, or country and not in another.

The "mobile me" revolution will be complete when you can move seamlessly around the

town, the country, or the world with whatever device you want. The technology is

getting there. When this is fully diffused, the "mobile me" will have its full

flattening effect, by freeing people to truly be able to work and communicate from

anywhere to anywhere with anything.

I got a taste of what is coming by spending a morning at the Tokyo headquarters of

NTT DoCoMo, the Japanese cellular giant that is at the cutting edge of this process

and far ahead of America in offering total interoperability inside Japan. DoCoMo is

an abbreviation for Do

Communications Over the Mobile Network; it also means "anywhere" in Japanese. My day

at DoCoMo's headquarters started with a tour conducted by a robot, which bowed in

perfect Japanese fashion and then gave me a spin around DoCoMo's showroom, which now

features handheld video cell phones so you can see the person you are speaking with.

"Young people are using our mobile phones today as two-way videophones," explained

Tamon Mitsuishi, senior VP of the Ubiquitous Business Department at DoCoMo. "Everyone

takes out their phones, they start dialing each other and have visual conversations.

Of course there are some people who prefer not to see each other's faces." Thanks

to DoCoMo technology, if you don't want to show your face you can substitute a cartoon

character for yourself and manipulate the keyboard so that it not only will speak

for you but also will get angry for you and get happy for you. "So this is a mobile

phone, and video camera, but it has also evolved to the extent that it has functions

similar to a PC," he added. "You need to move your buttons quickly [with your thumb].

We call ourselves 'the thumb people.' Young girls in high school can now move their

thumbs faster than they can type on a PC."

By the way, I asked, what does the "Ubiquitous Department" do?

"Now that we have seen the spread of the Internet around the world," answered Mitsuishi,

"what we believe we have to offer is the next step. Internet communication until today

has been mostly between individuals-e-mail and other information. But what we are

already starting to see is communication between individuals and machines and between

machines. We are moving into that kind of phenomenon, because people want to lead

a richer lifestyle, and businesses want more efficient practices ... So young people

in their business life use PCs in the offices, but in their private time they base

their lifestyles on a mobile phone. There is now a growing movement to allow payment

by mobile phone. [With] a smart card you will be able to make payments in virtual

shops and smart shops. So next to the cash register there will be a reader of the

card, and you just scan your phone and it becomes your credit card too . . .

"We believe that the mobile phone will become the essential con-

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trailer of a person's life," added Mitsuishi, oblivious of the double meaning of the

English word "control." "For example, in the medical field it will be your

authentication system and you can examine your medical records, and to make payments

you will have to hold a mobile phone. You will not be able to lead a life without

a mobile phone, and it will control things at home too. We believe that we need to

expand the range of machines that can be controlled by mobile phone."

There is plenty to worry about in this future, from kids being lured by online sexual

predators through their cell phones, to employees spending too much time playing

mindless phone games, to people using their phone cameras for all sorts of illicit

activities. Some Japanese were going into bookstores, pulling down cookbooks, and

taking pictures of the recipes and then walking out. Fortunately, camera phones are

now being enabled to make a noise when they shoot a picture, so that a store owner,

or the person standing next to you in the locker room, will know if he is on Candid

Camera. Because your Internet-enabled camera phone is not just a camera; it is also

a copy machine, with worldwide distribution potential.

DoCoMo is now working with other Japanese companies on an arrangement by which you

may be walking down the street and see a poster of a concert by Madonna in Tokyo.

The poster will have a bar code and you can buy your tickets by just scanning the

bar code. Another poster might be for a new Madonna CD. Just scan the bar code with

your cell phone and it will give you a sample of the songs. If you like them, scan

it again and you can buy the whole album and have it home-delivered. No wonder my

New York Times colleague in Japan, Todd Zaun, who is married to a Japanese woman,

remarked to me that there is so much information the Japanese can now access from

their Internet-enabled wireless phones that "when I am with my Japanese relatives

and someone has a question, the first thing they do is reach for the phone."