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What Will Be vs. Informational Rules

Customer Description:

Write a comparison on two books: "What Will Be" by Micheal Dertouzos and "Information Rules" by Shapiro and Varian. Discuss the major controversial issues of the writings.

Paper Body:

People who still dread keyboards may find some relief in What Will Be by Micheal Dertouzos and Information Rules by Shapiro and Varian. Authors predict they will be disappearing within five years--replaced by systems that will allow us to talk to computers. As a result, computers will shrink in size, proliferate, and end up in everything that can draw power from the wall or a battery. And they'll all be connected to the Internet. In this paper, I will contrast and compare these two books. In order to perform it, I will analyze each book and then draw some comparisons of the books.

Tomorrow's ''information marketplace'' will offer a panoply of tools to help us deal with computers--and vice versa. Systems will learn what we want by tracking our eye movements. Business cards won't be necessary because handshakes will trigger information exchanges between our so-called Bodynets. These Bodynets will link a personal armada of tiny silicon chips--buried in shoes, belts, and credit cards--with the outside world, so people can make phone calls, check E-mail, watch TV, and buy groceries while walking down the street. Eyeglasses will become de rigueur since they'll provide video displays.
These are among the minor changes in store, authors (Dertouzos and Shapiro and Varian believe).

The big ones include a new sense of community. Personal computers have often exacerbated the divergence in shared experience unleashed by technology. Like cars, PCs tend to isolate us in private, often dehumanizing cocoons. Many home PCs still aren't equipped with modems. But ubiquitous computers hooked to a wireless, global, multimedia Internet ''will rebuild the notion of community, this time among millions of people,'' he argues. For people with common interests, geography will be immaterial. The world will evolve from ''computer autocracy to computer democracy.''

In Information Rules by Shapiro and Varian, authors warn managers, "Ignore basic economic principles at your own risk. Technology changes. Economic laws do not." Understanding these laws and their relevance to information goods is critical when fashioning today's successful competitive strategies. Information Rules introduces and explains the economic concepts needed to navigate the evolving network economy.

Michael Dertouzos states in his book that the Second major explosion of the Information Marketplace, following the entertainment transformation already underway, will take place in health care. We have to come to agreement on shared conventions. It could be as simple as standardizing electronic forms for buying or selling goods, for routing health care information.

In his book, Dertouzos dispels much of the conventional hype about technology and its future, and offers an insider's view of what 21st century life will actually be like. He charts the changes and technological advances that will affect our society, culture, economy, and private lives. He previews technology now only dreamt of - from "bodynets" that will let you make phone calls and pay bills as you walk down the street, to "smart rooms" and speech recognition programs that will make keyboards, "windows", and "menus" obsolete.

He examines what comes after the Web; what technological innovations are truly on the horizon; and what specific steps companies should follow to get a head start. Information technology will change the world so profoundly that it will create a third socio-economic revolution equal in scale the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions.

As a veteran technologist, Dertouzos really does know what's feasible and what's not; as the director of a high-powered research lab, he knows what the industry is likely to implement next year, in 5 years, and even in 10 years. Because of this, his assessments of the future make better reading than others'.
He leavens his prognostications with several highly gratifying diatribes against various false claims and hype.

One of my favorites is in the section on how technology is affecting business. He deflates the idea of the Chief Knowledge Officer position that many major corporations have sought to fill, saying that it is silly and useless. He also throws in a few "tricks" involving gee-whiz scenarios that are actually true today, such as one about an artificial-intelligence program that determines digitalis dosages to heart patients...