June 5, 1997

Techies need not apply

Wanted: Liberal-arts major. Strong creative-writing skills needed. Background in 19th-century romance poets a plus. Ability to use the Net required. Techies need not apply.

I was fascinated by Maury Wright's article about the travails and triumphs of bringing Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) into his house ("ISDN in your home: supercharged telecommuting," EDN, Jan 16, 1997). It made me want to take a slight detour from my normal embedded-systems rants to comment on the realities of Internet access. I guess I have a bit of a different perspective on the Net, having started an Internet service provider (ISP) business two years ago. It has been an eye-opening experience, a chance to learn far more than I ever expected.

Let me start with a story. A customer arrived one afternoon for a surfing demo. After she assured us that she was unusually computer-literate, our technician gave her a few minutes of guidance and stepped out of the room to get a cup of coffee. Coming back, he was astonished to see the client, frustrated, trying to move the cursor by waving the mouse in the air, above the desk, as if it were an actuator for a 3-D system!

We engineers found this anecdote amusing, and many variants of the word "idiot" came from our lips. Upon reflection, though, I recalled a scene from a Star Trek movie in which Scotty, confronted with 1990s-era computer technology, attempts to control the computer by using the mouse as a microphone.

The computer and the Net are nothing more than tools. We embedded folks are so deeply drawn in by the ones and zeros that we all too often see these technologies as ends in themselves. Because we created the computer revolution, this perception is easy to understand. What's not so clear is the strange priesthood that our society seems to nourish, where "computer literacy" requires the mastery of a sea of acronyms and tool-specific information, where the tool itself becomes our god, its use and exploitation too often neglected.

Technical difficulties

If PCs were free, they'd still be one of the most expensive things a company owns. Some surveys show that each computer costs of tens of thousands of dollars a year to support. How many of us struggle to install new software, only to find that it conflicts with another application? How much time do we spend idle waiting for a LAN repair? These costs are quite real and quite substantial.

An Internet connection enormously magnifies the issues. Router problems impact millions of users, each wondering if he is doing something wrong.

As an ISP, I've found that establishing an Internet connection can be astonishingly difficult. Is the customer using a Mac or a PC? Windows 95 or 3.1? What sort of modem? Does he want multiple mailboxes? Many IP addresses routed to one modem?

I laughed while reading Maury's discussion about the difficulties of getting an ISDN connection. Not one of our ISDN customers has had a smooth installation. We now have a policy about the Bell Atlantic hookup: We multiply by three whatever Bell Atlantic promises for delivery time. This factor seems to be just about right.

Then there's the problem of ISDN routers. These beasts don't look like much, but they are hideously more complex than a modem. Someone must set up a router at the ISP and in our customer's home or office, which is a painful, error-prone process. Every vendor has a different setup. There's also the issue of buggy software.

Most of our ISDN customers have a surprising level of technical competence, which somewhat reduces the support burden. (Routers go down, route tables explode, some of the hardware chokes when the ISDN line burps, so support never ends.) Worse is a recent move to connect small-office LANs to the Net over a modem. It's a logical idea if only a few PCs are involved, especially if most of the traffic is just e-mail. The support problems, though, can boggle the mind.

Sometimes, customers install a Unix or an NT box to route traffic via a modem to us. Only a computer guru can make this routing work, yet a surprising number of customers somehow think they can do it and are crushed when their house of shareware cards collapses.

This technology is nothing more than an enabling mechanism for communication among people. Our society will struggle with, improve, and individually master the tools itself. What then?

I can't help wondering if we, the techies who created the Internet--the most profound medium for communication since the telephone--simply have nothing to say. This wonderful communications infrastructure overlaying so much of the globe is abuzz with talk about itself. Ah, sweet narcissism! You persist even into cyberspace!

Lately, though, there are signs of hope. The Internet's World Wide Web is a collection of millions of pages. Though many (including most of my own) are devoted to computer technology, every day we see more pages about subjects ranging from child-rearing to philology. Perhaps now the Net is coming into its own as a communications medium, and not as an end in itself.

Businesses will find prospects and convert them into customers by talking to them, informing them, and engaging them. The Web is potentially one effective tool toward this end, if businesses use it cleverly and strategically.

In one generation, word processing went from a techie dream to a basic skill that every business person must master. Similarly, Web-site creation and effective Net use are basic skills that everyone will eventually master. Every day, new and improved software tools reduce the tedium of Web-page creation. These tools allow us to transcend the trivial details of the technology and to focus on our message. Though we'll surely need new skills, they will be subordinated to the need to have a powerful, compelling, well-presented story. The medium will not be the message!

Someday, we'll see businesses fire their chief information technology officers and replace them with chief information officers. There's a world of difference between the two. Managing information is the key to success in the postindustrial world. Managing technology is a mere subset of managing information, one of many tasks necessary to reach out and touch someone.

The Internet will be the revenge of the liberal-arts majors. After decades of substandard pay compared with engineers and technologists, these long-neglected individuals will become the key to engaging our customers. At that point, the technologists will serve the artists, rather than vice versa. This situation is as it should be.

We digital folks have created a marvelous world of communications that baffles the average person. I'm astonished, and humbled, to see how difficult our creations are to use and how poorly the average person employs them. If there's anything we'll need in the next century, it's a focus on technology that the masses can use--technology as an enabler, not as an end in itself.

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