Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993 TAG: 9311220266
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: EDITORIAL EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BRIAN S. McCONNELL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The trial is an opportunity for Blacksburg and Southwest Virginia. The work in Blacksburg will affect the development of everything from computer software to televisions to appliances. The world is going digital: Tomorrow, every appliance from your VCR to your television to your oven will be able to talk to each other.
Blacksburg is the first city community to provide every resident with the ability to hop onto Internet, the worldwide information highway. known as the internet. The ``net'' as it is called, can take you to more than 100 countries, from libraries to USA Today to interactive chat forums where you can chew the fat with people worldwide. It's a revolutionary technology to bring profound change to the way we communicate, work, do business, learn and entertain ourselves.
The idea of the Blacksburg Electronic Village has its origins at Virginia Tech. Tech remains a driving force behind the project, which is both the best and worst thing about it.
Anyone who thinks Virginia Tech will single-handedly lead the region into prosperity does so at his or her own risk. This isn't to say Tech is involved in the project for the wrong reasons. But Tech is an educational institution, a strength - and a weakness.
The other major partner is C&P Telephone, which has made major strides since the old AT&T days when you could have as many phones as you wanted as long as they were black. But it is still a phone company. Phone companies are dreaming lately about becoming entertainment services. As P.J. O'Rourke once put it: Imagine a nightclub designed by the Postal Service.
Missing from the electronic village is a vision of how this experiment can be turned into a long-term engine for economic growth. It can, because the computer industry has reached a crossroads.
The technology has become so powerful and affordable that computers are becoming part of all kinds of appliances. People have also discovered that intelligent appliances (computers, TVs, VCRs, fax machines, etc.) become even more useful when they can talk to other machines. Making all these different machines work together in a way that serves their owners is tremendously difficult. To the companies that figure it out first, the benefits are big, billions of dollars big.
The electronic village is an exciting trial because it is not a lab experiment. It involves real people, real consumers doing really stupid things with their computers - which is exactly what's needed by the thousands of software companies who are trying to figure out these new technologies.
Things never work out likeas you expect them to. What seems simple to the inventor of a service might baffle consumers. What can go wrong will, and when several things go wrong at once, the worst possible scenario will be one of them. It is much cheaper to figure this out in a test than after you have rolled out what will later be compared to the next Edsel.
This is how we can bring potentially hundreds of high-paying, low-impact jobs into the region. Thousands of software companies which develop software, the instructions that make intelligent machines work together. It is the industry's major challenge over the next decade. The potential rewards for the companies that figure it out are huge; the risks of bringing some people to Blacksburg to explore tomorrow's world are small.
Some might say, ``This is hype! Just another Tech PR project!'' It isn't. Here's why:
I am the president of a software-development company. I have a choice. I can spend a lot of money to build my own corporate testing-ground spend a lot of money hiring people to build it, and then conduct rigidly controlled tests, just like a lab. Or, I can send a few employees to start a small office in a community that already has built a network where we can invent and test new services with real consumers, and where our people can go out drinking with our competitors. (The best ideas come from a competitor's sa les rep over a
bottle of Vodka.)
Option A costs millions. Option B is cheap. With Option B you get to play Spy vs. Spy. Option B is a no-brain sale - yet nobody is pitching Option B to the thousands of companies developing software, or at least isn't pitching it well.
The electronic village has the potential to bring a lot of jobs into the region, and to create a job base that will grow, rapidly, for the foreseeable future. People are fantasizing about a white knight, an AT&T or an IBM, coming to Blacksburg with 500 jobs on a platter. But the growth will come from many small companies setting up small outposts that may eventually grow into something larger, and from start-ups that get lucky.
The real winners in the late '90s are going to be small companies that figure out part of this puzzle. Some examples, from the personal-computer industry, that started small, real small: Apple,Computer, MicroSoft, Gateway Computers, Novell, and the list goes on and on.
The problem is that, for all their good intentions, Virginia Tech and C&P do not understand entrepeneurs - and it will be entrepreneurs, not corporate giants, who will push a lot of the advances into the Digital Age.
The solution is simple. Explain what we're doing to the hundreds, even thousands, of small software companies., and that involves talking to hundreds, even thousands of companies. The smart ones will come. The big companies will be complacent.
Put enough creative people in a 10-square-mile are a with lots of toys to play with, and the rest will take care of itself. These people will become entrenched. Many will eventually start new companies that will grow and, just as the computer industry created a dozen other related industries, will create the basis for new industry.
Until this takes place, we are wasting a window of opportunity that might last a couple of years before another community (with a warmer climate or real skiing) copies what we are building here, and puts that final piece in place.
Brian S. McConnell of Blacksburg is president of Commonwealth Multimedia, which develops telecommunications and multimedia software and services.
by CNB