Rise of the Information Marketplace

Appliances, mobility, nomadic software, and the people that use these capabilities will not come together spontaneously and wondrously in the new terrain to create an era of human-centric computing. Nor is it enough to say that “convergence” of all media to digital form will achieve this goal. That’s already here. What we need is a model of an underlying computer and communications infrastructure that will tie the elements together at a higher level, closer to what we want to do. Today’s Web and Internet are not yet there. Stripped of cosmetic adjectives, they are basically used for voyeurism and exhibitionism. And I don’t mean sex! I am talking about the millions of people and organizations showing off their wares for money, pride, or sharing, and the many millions who click away, peeking at these exhibitions. Much more than that lies ahead. The model toward which we are headed, which I have been forecasting for 20 years, is finally emerging: the Information Marketplace.

By 2010, over a billion people and their computers, along with some 100 billion appliances, will be interconnected. What will they all do? They will buy, sell, and freely exchange information and information services.

Make no mistake: The sharing of information and e-commerce over today’s Internet is only the tip of the Information Marketplace iceberg. Take, for example, the “content” that the press and Wall Street were hyperventilating about throughout the late 1990s, in the wake of proposed megamergers like that between America Online and Time Warner. All the content you can imagine – TV, movies, theater, radio, newspapers, magazines, books – accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s industrial economy. On the other hand, a whopping 50 percent of that economy – some $10 trillion –is office work, or, as it used to be called, white-collar work. This includes buy and sell transactions, reviewing mortgage applications, processing insurance forms, dealing with medical information, filling and reviewing millions of government forms, teaching and learning, selling customer services, and a myriad of business-to-business services. That’s information work – the processing of information by skilled humans, and secondarily by machines, and the delivery of that work where and when it is needed. This is barely happening over the Internet today, so no one talks about it. But it will be everywhere on tomorrow’s Information Marketplace. Human-centric computing must make it easy for people to offer their work across space and time if the Information Marketplace is to reach its full potential.

By 2020, and by my reckoning, some $4 trillion of this information work will flow over the Information Marketplace, shaking up the distribution of labor. Just imagine what 50 million Indians could do to the English-speaking industrial world using their ability to read and write English and offer their office skills, at a distance, for about one-third of what the West pays today. Such a move would have colossal economic consequences, in the distribution of work, internationally. It would also mark a poetic comeback for India, which may then be in a position to exert economic power on a nation like England that taught the Indians English to dominate them. As much as information work will flow from poor to rich, even more will flow from rich to rich – services that will be increasingly delivered via the Net because of speed and convenience. By the time this activity and the electronic commerce in goods level out, the “buy-and-sell” part of the Information Marketplace will grow from some $200 billion in 2000 to some $5 trillion annually, roughly one-fourth of the world industrial economy.

The “free exchange” part of the Information Marketplace will be just as important, because people have as much free time as work time, and they value what they do with it just as much. Already, the lives of many people are affected through family e-mail; collaboration, playing, and dating; entertainment through listening to music and viewing images and videos; accessing information of personal interest; engaging in discussions about literature, hobbies, and social issues; publishing their views, and much more. These uses will grow; when I speak publicly, I always ask those people in the audience who use e-mail to communicate with family members to raise their hand. The ratio, largely invisible in 1995, was consistently over 90 percent in 2000. Many new activities will arise as well that we can’t predict today.

Taken together, the monetary and non-monetary activities of the Information Marketplace, driven by the onrush of faster computers and communications, computerized appliances, mobile gadgets, and portable software, will propel us toward a world overflowing with information and information-related activities. The question is, “How can we build this world so we are ensured of doing more by doing less?” rather than drowning in information overload and computer complexity. Only by throwing out last century’s model for computing and adopting – indeed, demanding – a new computing philosophy, a new master plan, that lets people interact naturally, easily, and purposefully with each other and the surrounding physical world.

Human-centric computing will transform today’s individual computers, the Internet, and the Web into a true Information Marketplace, where we’ll buy, sell, and freely exchange information and information services using systems that will talk with us, do things for us, get information we want, help us work with other people, and adapt to our individual needs. Indeed, it is these five basic capabilities of computer and communications systems that are the pivotal forces of human-centric computing.

As builders of computer systems start turning these forces into useful technologies, the rest of us who are collectively frustrated by today’s computers can accelerate the process by tirelessly repeating the rallying cry of human-centric computing: “Information technology should help people do more by doing less!” If we shout loud enough, entrepreneurial companies will make this request their goal. They will recognize the huge, pent-up demand for human-centric systems, and will build them, upstaging the massive computer-communications establishment and shifting the market in their direction.

………in the 1990s, when networking advances seemed to be leveling out, and it looked like nothing big could possibly happen, the biggest change of all took place – the World Wide Web arrived as a software application for Internetted computers. It hit the steadily growing community of interconnected users with a quantitative and qualitative jolt. Creating and browsing Web sites captivated the world so much that the number of interconnected users shot up to 300 million by the end of the 20th century, as they and the rest of the world began experiencing the awesome socioeconomic potential of the Information Marketplace.


Unlike the Industrial Revolution, which has run its course, the Information Revolution is still growing. All we have today is several practical activities, an abundance of exciting promises, and a gigantic tangle of complexities, confusions, and fads – to be sure, a revolution in the making, but one that is unfinished. The missing ingredient is human-centric computing. To put it into action requires three big steps: changing the mind-set of users and designers; ensuring that our machines are easier to use and make us more productive; and insisting that new technology reach many more people.


Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael L. Dertouzos