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Recently, Jeff Pemberton visited with Mike Kinkead at the SandPoint/Hoover offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here are some excerpts of their discussion, giving ONLINE readers a chance to listen in on their freewheeling exchange of ideas about what the future holds in our fastpaced online industry.
JKP: Mike, SandPoint, which is a division of Information Access Company, has recently undergone some changes. Do you have a new title?
MK: I'm now Vice President of Planning for Information Access Company.
JKP: Will you be headquartered here or move to California?
MK: I'll continue to be headquartered here, although I'm doing a lot of traveling and I spend about half my time on the West Coast.
JKP: What kinds of changes do you see in store for IAC and the industry?
MK: I'm a trustee of the Massachusetts Software Council and I was introducing Eric Schmidt, the Chief Technology Officer of Sun Microsystems at one of our quarterly meetings about a week ago. He started his talk by asking the audience, "How many of you think that the Internet is under-hyped?" One person raised his hand. Eric went on to say that he agreed with that person, that the Internet is way under-hyped-that, in fact, we don't begin to realize how dramatically things will change as a result of the Internet and the Web. I agree with him.
The Internet changes everything, not just the technology that we're using, but commerce and culture. So it has wide-ranging impacts on everything that we do.
Look at the paradigm shifts that are happening in the whole arena of digital convergence, where we're bringing computing together with telecommunications, with content and activity. Starting with computing, the whole computing paradigm is shifting, from the old model that was Microsoft-based with big applications on powerful PCs all working through the Microsoft API. Then Sun came along with Java, which is making possible a whole new computing paradigm. The computing applications, or applets as they are called, will be in a server. As you need to do something on your PC, you'll pull down that applet, do something, and then let it go. That is basically spawning the reinvention of the computing side of our industry.
The players that are lining up are...