I meet all kinds of people by e-mail. It makes your work more efficient, and it gives you more time to see people you want to see, to have real communications with other people, which is what most of us live for in various ways. Even chief executives of technology companies are now saying they can barely see a year out with any certainty. Yes, technological change is fabulously fast today. But on the future of technology, I have this sort of riff. . .
Every technological era is defined by a new abundance and a new scarcity.
Any company, any industry, had to use watts in order to prosper. Those that exploited cheap watts gained market share against all other companies and industries, and thus came to dominate the economy. The last 30 years have been the era of the microprocessor-mips and bits. And I believe a new key factor of production is approaching its cliff of cost, and that is bandwidth-bits per second. It's going to be the plummeting price of bandwidth that will define the new era.