Hope You Brought Something to Read During Info Highway Wait

Just how long will it be before we get the information highway? Much of the popular press is now taking the position that the collapse of the big mergers between telephone and cable television companies means the highway will take longer to build than thought. They are right, but for all the wrong reasons.

When it comes to the information highway, there are two realities: the Washington, D.C., reality and the Washington state reality.

In Washington, D.C., the federal government struggles to figure out if it can guide the development of the information highway. In the state of Washington, the computer industry--led by Redmond-based Microsoft Corp.--struggles to construct a network that will actually work.

In the nation’s capital, two recent events indicate the government’s mind-set.

First, the Federal Communications Commission decides to cut cable TV rates by about 7%. This leads directly to the collapse of the Tele-Communications Inc.-Bell Atlantic Corp. merger and the failure of a series of other mergers, including a big one between Southwestern Bell Corp. and Cox Cable Communications.

Just a few weeks later, Vice President Al Gore makes a speech in which he explicitly says the information highway should look more like the Internet than cable television.

The juxtaposition of these two events leads the world at large to conclude that the White House has directed the FCC to make sure there isn’t enough money in the cable TV business for those companies to be attractive to telephone companies.

Indeed, the world begins to think there is actually a coordinated strategy being effectively implemented by the executive branch of the federal government--something not seen in Washington for several decades.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the FCC cable rate action was taken without foreknowledge by the White House. And the vice president’s statement about the Internet has still got most in the capital scratching their heads, since there probably aren’t more than a dozen senior government officials who have even read an Internet electronic mail message, much less have any concept of the difference between the Internet network and the cable networks.

Meanwhile, in Washington state, there are frenetic attempts to develop products that might serve as an information highway.

Actually, the opening salvo in this war has been fired by Oracle Corp. in Redwood City, Calif., one of the few companies big enough and obstreperous enough to challenge Microsoft directly.

Oracle has chosen to go for the heart. It has introduced a product called Media Server designed to provide movies on demand for interactive television networks. Oracle specializes in the kind of software big companies use to run their most difficult operations on mainframe computers. And it has cast centralized computing on big computers as a religious exercise, warning customers against trusting their video services to the kind of personal computer software that often doesn’t work.

Microsoft is not about to let this opportunity go by, and it’s working to prove Oracle wrong. Bill Gates’ company believes it is possible to provide the same kind of responsiveness and reliability that mainframes have traditionally offered via massive networks of PCs. To that end, it is developing a system code-named “Tiger.”

Still, the objective reality--the one that supersedes the realities of both Washington, D.C., and Washington state--is that nobody involved knows for sure how to build the information highway. Everybody believes it will be done, but building the highway requires a kind of social consensus as well as a level of technical sophistication that does not yet exist.

For the information highway to work as Gore implied--for your television set to be a node on a full-service, two-way digital network that is connected to every other network in the country--we will have to, at a minimum, reproduce the kind of networks already installed in leading-edge corporations. Yet the state of corporate information systems doesn’t come anywhere near the perfection many people are predicting for the home in just a few years.

In my own company, for instance, where everyone has a computer and all the computers are attached to a common network, we have constant problems with technology:

* The software we use to produce our newspaper does its job, but it is maddeningly slow and sometimes fails at crucial times.

* The software we use to share information among our sales staff is very difficult for normal people to understand and use--and improvements are taking years to put into use.

* The software we use to keep track of our financial activity is primitive, but to get the kind of daily financial information we all want would require more money than we traditionally have spent and expertise no one in our company has.

* Our e-mail software works fine--except that we frequently find people never got critical messages that were supposed to go to everyone in the company.

Our company is a profitable commercial operation that spends about 10% of annual revenue on its computer operations. It is also reasonably typical in its experiences with computer systems. And if it has taken the personal computer industry about 10 years to get this far, it would seem reasonable to expect it might take another 10 to build the vanguard elements of the information highway.

So you have to wonder why everybody is getting so exercised about the highway now.

To tell you the truth, I feel a little better knowing we have a vice president who seems to know what the Internet is. But I also have the sneaking suspicion that the information highway is not as immediate an issue as everybody seems to think--and that our federal government and our leading technology companies are setting expectations that cannot ever match reality.