Technology Talks; 102; Power of the Microchip

The power of the microchip next on technology talks. Hello, I'm Pauline Eisenstadt. Welcome to Technology Talks. The telecommunications and the internet are now transforming how Americans live, think, talk, go to school, make money, see the doctor and elect presidents. The microchip is the engine behind this revolution. Tonight we look at the power of the microchip. We'll discuss its present and future with our panel of guests, but first we pay to visit to one of the world's largest manufacturers of microchips. We are here at Intel Corporation in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, the largest chip manufacturer in the entire world.

I'm speaking this afternoon with Ralph Bond, who is the Consumer Education Director for Intel. Ralph, could you show us some of these interesting products you have with you? People know Intel primarily for our brain chips, like the Pentium 4 processor that's in this computer box, but our silicon expertise and our software expertise goes well beyond that, and we're beginning to explore that and take advantage of that. For a number of years we've been developing products such as these wireless peripherals, this wireless mouse, wireless keyboard, this innovative gamepad up here on top of the personal computer. We have some of our digital cameras, we have many years of expertise in digital imaging, another thing many consumers aren't aware of, we're applying that now in innovative ways. For example, probably the most innovative and amusing one for me is our toy. This is the first in a line of toy products for Intel, our Intel Playline, this is our toy microscope, the QX3 microscope. It connects to the personal computer, so it's a great example of what we now call an extended PC product. How can we cleverly find ways to take our technology and enhance and extend the value of the personal computer?

Like any microscope, you can put objects underneath the lens, you can change the magnification power, but the huge difference in where the computer jumps in and contributes to this is changing the microscope from a one-to-one person looking into an eyepiece to a social activity where we're all looking at the object together. And with this product, just as one example, we can take snapshots of the images or record short movies if you have little bugs in a dish, you can take a movie of them running around. And you can save your movies and then with everything going digital and everything connected to the internet, we can take our pictures or our little movies that we create with this product and share them on the website as email attachments or perhaps as many classrooms throughout the United States and around the world abuse this product, create websites illustrating their science projects or other things of that nature. You can see we can put almost anything underneath the microscope. Here's a leaf, for example.

What's really great for kids of all ages is to discover the microscopic world. Here we're looking at a dollar and you can really begin to see the world the human eye can't see. And because this is detachable, unlike a traditional microscope, we can carry it around and we can use it to focus on anything we wish. This opens up a whole new world of exploration and learning for kids, again, all digital and finding clever ways to extend the value of the personal computer. Many times when I bring this out and show it to people, they think, my gosh, this is an awfully large clunky picture frame. What's that all about? Actually, this is a fully functional state of the art personal computer. This computer, which looks like a big thick picture frame, has all the capabilities of this Pentium 4 processor machine you see here of this size. And the mission was to look at ways to take advantage of not only the incredible power of the Pentium 4 processor, but also equally important. The miniaturization of circuit boards and reduction of all the various idiosyncratic connectors on the back of the PC going down to just one uniform universal serial bus.

Can we get the PC down to a small size? And on top of that, can we have some fun with it? Can we find some innovative new things the PC can do? Here's a fully functional, super powerful personal computer that can sit on your desktop and double as a picture frame and be an ornamental object. It has the ability to hold a picture frame on both sides so we can orient it this way horizontally or vertically. With the changes in the NASDAQ and the market, a lot of people are wondering, do you think that the high-tech boom is over? I can't predict about the high-tech boom for all parts of the digital industries, but certainly when I look at the home computer, far from being at the end of its glory years, far from entering into what some people call the post PC era, I think we're at the beginning of a new renaissance for the home personal computer. It's going to evolve to take its rightful place at the center of your home digital universe, so I see a great, great future for the personal computer going forward.

With me in the studio tonight is Bill Garcia, New Mexico Manager of Public Affairs at Intel. Welcome Bill. Todd Underwood, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Osso Grande Technologies. We're pleased you're here and our visitor from Oregon, Ralph Bond, Intel Consumer Education Manager. It's delightful for all of us in New Mexico to have you here this evening to discuss the power of the microchip. I want to start out by quoting from Andy Grove, who is the Intel Chairman, and he says, we are witnessing a fundamental shift in how the world operates. This was in the recent Intel Annual Report. I think we can all agree with that, and the personal computer turns 20 this year. And I wanted to indicate to our audience and to all of you something that was said in 1977 by the Digital Equipment President, Ken Olson. He said, there's no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. And I mean, perhaps at that time it wasn't clear all of the uses that the computer would find in everybody's home.

I want to start out with a question, and I'd like all of you to give it some thought, and I'm going to start with Ralph. Would you kind of describe what was life like before, during, and after the personal computer revolution? It's a favorite topic around my house, because with my 17-year-old and my 13-year-old, of course they have no recollection of life without personal computers in their homes. And I love to wag my finger like the old guy at school saying, listen here, sonny, listen here, kiddo, I know what cut and paste really means when I worked on my college term papers. I literally had to get out scissors and cut up pieces that were still okay with my thesis committee and tape them down on a blank sheet of paper, go and Xerox them and put it together and turn it in the next day for review. That's real cut and paste. I know what a typewriter is, and what that's white out is, and all that fun, wonderful stuff. And my kids look at me and say, what in the world are you talking about, or they say funny things like, well, how did you put up? Well, it's unacceptable. I mean, this is ridiculous, and I go, well, you don't realize what the personal computer has done for us in the 20-some odd years that we've had micro computers.

Well, that's certainly a model that I can identify with. And I think what has happened is different age groups have had different experiences. In our neighborhood, you have a problem with your computer, you get the nearest 10-year-old, and they can fix it. I mean, I don't know how to fix them. I know how to work them. That's it. Bill, what do you think? I think there's a fundamental change in the way we work as a result of the computer. And when you think about all of the information that's been made available, how quickly it's available, the calculations that can be done now. And you just think back about when we were originally starting in America to pursue a trip to the moon. All of the needs were processing information and understanding calculations and so forth. That was greatly enhanced by the computer. In fact, could not have been done without the computer. So I think we've progressed immensely as a society, both in terms of technical advancements, but also in terms of efficiencies in the workplace. Yes, of course. Todd, you're the youngest here.

Well, and maybe my perspective is affected by that. I actually think that what we have benefited from by means of the microchip so far has been trivial and uninteresting. I think that the best by far is yet to come. When you look at the numbers throughout the 80s and 90s, we spent billions of dollars on automating bad business processes with microchips and got little or no productivity benefit out of it. In the late 90s and early in this century, we've started to see some real changes in the way people work as a result of increased sophistication on the part of computers. So I think when we look back at the 80s and 90s and talk about the personal computer in the 80s and 90s, five or 10 years from now, we're going to laugh and we're going to say, God, those things didn't work very well. We had to get 10 year olds to fix them. They just, they didn't stay up. They crashed. They were slow. They didn't communicate with each other. I had to learn how to work them rather than them learning how to work with me. So I think, I think there have been big changes, but I think there are far bigger changes to come. Well, that that precedes my next question. I wanted to ask you all what kind of changes do you see in the future? Where, where is the computer heading? What, what's the next step?

Well, I really like what Todd was saying a moment ago because in this industry, we often hear people saying we're at the end of the personal computer era. It's run its course. It's time for other so-called appliances to take their place. And while we believe appliances have a role, digital appliances of all kind, whether they're digital cameras or other devices that just surf the internet alone, we think the personal computer, as Todd was alluding to, has just begun to see its potential. It's not at the end of its course. If you look at the history of, say, the last 20 years since IBM elected to enter into this market of personal computers, the first 10 years or so were productivity enhancement. Very helpful, like my story about automating my word processing was wonderful, spreadsheets were wonderful, these were great things, but they were pretty simplistic concepts of automating process and technologies we already had in our disposal. And then we had the multimedia age where the personal computer come in in the late 80s, early 90s where we added more sound, the CD-ROM, other things expand and happen. Then, of course, the internet boom, the worldwide web for the consumers, browsers, making the personal computer the player of choice for internet content, that's exciting.

And now as we enter into the future, we see a pattern called the extended PC model. This is where the personal computers immense power. And I think what Todd's alluding to is yet to come in terms of what we can do with this that's far more exciting than just making our typewriting easier or just making our multimedia more accessible. You anticipate it will first be within the business community that the changes take place and then it comes later into the residential areas. I think it's both. You think that the changes are going to happen everywhere. Yeah, and there's been some interesting cases where change happens in residential applications before it reaches businesses. Multimedia is a great example from the 80s where people were demanding CD-ROMs and audio cards and multimedia video cards in their homes, primarily for video games for their teenage sons, long before the businesses saw the application of those. I think that there's a lot of reason to look on the business side for a lot of these innovations because as long as there are problems and issues to be addressed and solved in our society, I think that's an opportunity.

When you think about healthcare and who's not involved or engaged in healthcare in one form or another, how can we make that more efficient? Think about the information that's being developed about patients and patient care and how can technology help in providing better diagnosis, faster diagnosis from remote areas? Yes. So I see great promise because there's still a lot of issues that are unsolved in the world and I see this technology is addressing a lot of those issues. And it's cross-border technology. It's not a geographic thing where you develop it here and you use it in New Mexico or you use it in Oregon, it goes everywhere. And that's part of the excitement of it. Talk to me about voice recognition Ralph. Voice recognition is certainly one of those areas that again going back to Todd's earlier comment about this not being the end, but actually I think a new renaissance for the personal computer. We finally are beginning to achieve the kind of compute power, the raw power necessary to start doing realistic and rewarding voice recognition.

Simply put, this is like imagine your Star Trek TV show where you come in and you say, computer, bring up my recipes and geladas, grandma's recipe. I want the voice recognition. And say, you know, read the recipe to me when I say I'm ready for the next step. It's that kind of futuristic Jetsons like capabilities of talking to our computers, having our computers talk back whether they're just dealing with information stored locally on the personal computer or even more compelling information they're pulling from around the world off the internet. How far away are we from that voice recognition? Is that around the corner? Most of the technologies I talk to in the community of researchers up in Oregon where I'm from and until architecture labs. Look at this in about maybe two to three, maybe five years will finally achieve the kind of immense compute power in mainstream consumer personal computers that will allow us to have that kind of seamless, naturally speaking recognition. Well, let's see, the problem is the technology is there right now, but when we say, you know, I want to email my brother and have it expect to know which brother based on what mood I'm in and, you know, which one I emailed last.

I think there's user interface questions that even if the technology is there to do voice recognition accurately, one out there yet. Now, what about wireless? I mean, if we can extend wireless through satellites all around the world, then they wouldn't need some of the infrastructure. I heard Bill Gates speaking and he said wireless would be here within 10 years so that we wouldn't have to put infrastructure in broadband in the continent of Africa. They could they could have cell phones and everything else. Do you agree with that? He's a major investor and so low on that. Wherever the company is, he and Craig McCarr or so, I think that might have colored his thoughts. But on the other hand, I think that there's tremendous, there's a need for that's part that's one of the problems we have. How do we get broadband capacity out into communities that are rural in nature or have great distances and don't have the concentrations of individuals? Certainly that kind of transportable technology wireless technology can offer great capacity.

Yes. Bill, talk to me a little bit about New Mexico. What do you see in the future here? Are we going to be able to attract more technology industry? I know you've been very active in the idea of clusters and bringing businesses in to meet certain needs and economic development. You and I have talked numerous times. It's my hope that New Mexico will become a technology state. I think in many regards, I think we've laid a very excellent foundation for that polling and particularly when you look at some of the companies that are here and I'm not just talking about Intel. I'm talking about some of the up and coming companies, the flying 40 companies, the technology spin outs that are coming out of Sandia National Labs and out of Los Alamos National Labs. I think one of our key assets in New Mexico is that we have the National Labs and all that brain power. It's intellectual power that we have there and the ability to capture that and turn that into jobs and companies I think is a great opportunity for. So I'm optimistic about that.

I am too. If we all pull in the same direction, maybe we can do that. I think we can become like in Austin, Texas, certainly in our areas. Tell me now what there are problems. Obviously there are public policy problems and we will have future shows on privacy on the internet, on taxing the internet. These are public policy issues that we haven't resolved and I'm hopeful as we discuss them, we can come to some conclusions that might be helpful in the public policy realm. What about robots and smart cards? One of the most interesting things I'm aware of, recent technology is the devices, these tiny microscopic machines for a lack of better term. Actually, electromechanical devices that are on a microscopic scale that can be just one example of talking about medicine earlier that could be released in the human body and be programmed, if you will, to go and target cancer in your body and attack it with direct local application of medicine. That's when you talk about robotics or you talk about other technologies where the expertise in miniaturizing, which of course Intel plays a role in in our own way, is so exciting for the future that what was that wonderful movie from the 1950s or 60s of amazing journey or fantastic voyage. This kind of technology, again I call it the Jetson syndrome, is really coming and I think the next 10 years and the next 20 years are just going to be unbelievable.

Sandy and National Laboratories is a leader in that kind of technology, they're a pioneer and they're bringing that kind of technology and hopefully to the marketplace. There is an if, I mean all of this is so exciting, but how do we get there and it all talks about the new economy and what are the requirements for new economy. Essentially, it skills and adaptability and education, for example. In 1960, there were 5,000 computer programmers. My husband used to teach engineering at University of California and taught computers and they were using vacuum tubes. That dates him, but it tells you how, and he was in the late 60s, he was a professor there. Today there are over 1,400,000 computer programmers. The new economy has changed the workforce skills needed for productivity and growth. Medium job tenure for males declined from around 6 years in the 1980s to 5 years in the 2000. Am I making you all nervous? How do the new economy employees prepare themselves for jobs?

That's a great question. I mean clearly what some in the industry call it has almost become a trite phrase. The computer literacy or technology literacy is a better phrase I think is critical and in fact I can bring it home to where I work at Intel. Everybody from our administrators all the way up through our top management, of course, are proficient in using all of the infrastructure, the intranet, our internal email services and our other web-based services that are critical. Our company, fortunately, is very much on the forefront of computerizing and using the web wherever possible to automate all the process that we have. I can book all of my travel online from my computer in my cubicle and it's that kind of knowledge, that kind of comfort with this technology. I think it's critical for anyone entering the workforce today. Do you train them or do you have to hire them with the skills? Both. I think one of the things that I see at Osar Grande and also throughout the industry is that employees who believe that they are going to learn a set of skills and take advantage of those skills for a significant period of time are now deceiving themselves. That you talk about computer programmers.

A lot of us are looking for Java programmers right now. Ten years from now we probably won't be in. Anybody who thinks that they're going to spend the rest of their life as a Java programmer is seriously diluting themselves. The skill that I look for in new employees is aptitude, willingness to learn new skills. Because for the most part, the skills that they have when they show up are bound to be outdated in a short period of time anyway. One of the things we've done a lot of work in the educational community until as in what we've been emphasizing are fundamentals. Because if you don't have a fundamentals of math and science, you're not going to be able to develop those kinds of aptitudes. And so if you don't have the basic fundamentals to start with and those are so important, then you're not going to be as adaptable in the future to pick up these other skills. So very important that early on in education that we emphasize science and math and that we find ways to make it more interesting and more fun and engaging with students. And there's a lot of work being done in that area. Last week we talked with Paul Russenoff from AOL Time Warner.

And he said they had just given teachers in Virginia high tech awards. And I suggested well, would AOL be interested in working with us here? And he said he would. So we will, yes I did. And he will follow up on that and maybe we can get AOL to help us with our program and add another one to the program that you did a couple of weeks ago here with a golden apple. Paul and related to that, just as a sort of tie-in, Intel has been very generous in donating used computers to New Mexico tech net also around his parent company. Yes, and the schools can call... And we... New Mexico tech net. Absolutely, they can go to technet.nm.org and apply. And in my former life as a state legislator, state senator, I did have schools in parts of my district like in Bernalillo and East Mountain areas called technet and they were able to get refurbished computers. And it makes a big difference if teachers and students don't have access to this technology and exposure to it, they'll never get the basic familiarity that they need. We're about coming to a close, unfortunately. Tell me, what do you think are the key ingredients of the new economy in terms of the workforce? What are the necessary skills?

I mean, I think adaptability was mentioned. It seems like things are changing quickly and you have to... I think one has to change quickly. What do you think the important ingredients would be? I think all the things that you've mentioned, another part of it though is learning to work in teams. I think our new economy is going to require that kind of skill. So you'll have the technology skills and you'll have the fundamentals. But it's also that social side that teaches you and requires that we work together effectively, teaming concepts and teaming projects. Which is a different kind of an attitude than it used to be. We used to have a very hierarchical kind of industrial and business. It's a new model. It isn't top down. It isn't you do what I tell you to do. It's just got the information to address the problem effectively and that's kind of changing, I think, in the world. And I think that we've had pioneers particularly in the information technology internet businesses.

I can't let you all leave without asking what you and Ralph, I've already asked you. I don't know if you've changed since we did our initial taping. Yes, everything changes fast. Do you think that the drop in the NASDAQ market will have an effect on the innovation and the new technology that we're all anticipating? We're asking this to people who work for high tech companies. Of course not. Everything's going to be perfect. It will enhance had an effect on the rate of innovation. The amount of capital available for new companies has declined. But for existing companies, those in the manufacturing sector have been hard. Those of us in the service sector have seen a decline or a flattening of growth but not in elimination. I think people have put the question, do we really think three or five years from now people will be doing less on the internet? Will they really be using fewer computers to do fewer things? And the answer is obviously not. And nobody thinks that. Nobody thinks that.

And so people who say that the internet age is over are just missing the boat as far as we can tell. Bill, you agree? Absolutely. I think it's taking a deep breath right now. I think it's only taking that breath to start hitting the next steep incline. I really believe that. Okay, Ralph. I feel that you're not going to come out of this current economic situation by restraining innovation and basic research until we're definitely not on that path. We know we'll come out of this eventually and when we do, we're going to be ready with new innovative technologies. My guess last week, who is the head of the United States Internet Council Bill Myers, suggested that with the mergers of the larger companies, the ones that might be hurt are the small, more creative, innovative ideas that would have been funded five years ago. But that the venture capitalists are looking at and saying, no, we're going to wait a while. Let's see if the high flyers can pull together. I mean, there's a change in the thinking. Five years ago, everybody had an initial public offering and the young ones were making so much money.

We were looking at them with, you know... Jealousy. Jealousy. And big eyes. I mean, and I had one of my young son's friends was doing websites and he did very well. But not as well, he didn't get out right in time. This thing, it was a bubble for all of it and now it's settling out, but it's not going away. Would that be an accurate description? Yeah, I think one of the lessons I picked up from the dot bomb, which is our joke about this last era we've come out of, is that it's not enough to have innovative and creative ideas. You also still need the good, classic business fundamentals in place along with the creativity in order to succeed. I think, for me, personally, as an observer of the industry, that's a big lesson that's coming out of this last period. Yes, and I think everybody has learned it. I think I have to close now. Unfortunately, we could spend another couple of hours or days discussing this. And I hope we'll have another opportunity. Gentlemen, I want to thank you for visiting with us and join me next week when Technology Talks looks at taxes on the Internet.

Thank you all. Thank you. Funding Web Technology Talks has been provided by America Online Time Warner, Intel Corporation, Quest Communications, and Electrasonics. This Technology Talks program is available on home video cassette for 1495 plus shipping and handling. To order, call 1-800-328-5663. Thank you.