Home & Office
A Change in the Air...
The industry is moving, slowly but surely, to broadband. To keep the public happy, most companies aren't marketing their broadband products loudly...
The industry is moving, slowly but surely, to broadband. To keep the public happy, most companies aren't marketing their broadband products loudly... they want to move slowly to keep the pressure of installation and customer support to a minimum. Nobody wants to repeat @Home's debacle of customer dissatisfaction.
Cable modems are expected to be shipping, preinstalled on personal computers by Christmas 1999... but that's just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
What the experts were saying
The industry bigwigs at the conference — people like Steve Bannerman (the QuickTime 4 guy from Apple), Abhi Chaki (from Jupiter Communications), and Caroline Beck (from Intertainer) — were all preaching the same rhetoric: It's coming, and you'd better have something to deliver.
Sony's all over it. Intertainer is developing a hardware solution that allows you to buy any kind of software at all — movies, music, video games — all directly over the Net, with the single click of a mouse.