Transcript: I knew nothing about engineering, but I just was fascinated by it. And I bought a little . . . I think it cost me . . . a $100 computer called the Timex Sinclair around 1981. And I began tinkering with it. Learned a little bit of basic programming, and I just did it at home on the weekends and at night as a hobby. And I began to . . . Then I bought a much more expensive computer in around, I wanna say 1983 or so, something like that. I bought an Apple IIe, and that cost me like thousands of dollars for the computer and the disk drives and all that kind of stuff. It didn’t have a hard disk, of course. Eventually I bought a hard disk for it which also was unbelievably expensive. And I think what fascinated me about it was the communications aspects of it, which were very crude in those days; but you could . . . I was very early on what used to be called bulletin boards. You know, like forums that you would . . . you see today on the Web. But they were all text, and they were just local. And then I got on CompuServe. And then I got on AOL. And almost as soon as the Internet became publically available I was on that. So it was my hobby, and that’s how I got into it. And you know eventually I came up with the idea to stop writing about serious, global, national security kind of things which I was doing, and to start a new and different kind of technology column.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: I guess it must have been ’64 and ’65, they started this experiment. And they gave . . . They provided space for a column for every high school in their metro area. And it was not a democratic process. The English department or the principal or somebody in all these high schools appointed the columnists. And in my case, out of the blue they asked me to do it. And they asked me to do it together with the guy who was, at the time, my best friend in high school. And it’s somebody whose name is now well known. It’s James Woods, the Hollywood actor who went to high school with me. And he and I started to write this little column together. It was a completely uncontroversial column. All of them were. It was just like what was going on at the school; but not really what was going on. It was sort of officially what was going on. And he was then and now very interested in acting. So he dropped out of doing this after about a month and I kept it up on my own. And at the end . . . And I got bitten by the bug of journalism. I mean I think that, you know, if you’re a journalist your job is to question authority. And certainly the entire political climate in which I grew up, culminating really in Watergate, by which time I already was a journalist. But I mean that whole feeling that the government and authority could not be wholly trusted, that there was something noble about questioning authority played heavily into my attraction to journalism, yes.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Transcript: Well I mean look. I’m not a policy person. And not only that. As a journalist I’m not really free to express opinions on a lot of things. But it’s perfectly obvious that climate change is an enormous issue for everyone on the planet; that every kind of personal, and governmental, and commercial, and industrial activity on the planet is gonna have to change so that we don’t destroy the planet. Climate change, environmentalism, the whole green thing in general . . . And you can already see a lot of the same venture capital and investment money that was the lifeblood of high tech, some of that money now going to projects that are an attempt to apply technology to making the world cleaner and being greener. So I think, you know, that’s a huge thing. We obviously still have no idea just what the rise of China and India means. You know they have enormous economic potential, including, by the way, a significant high tech potential. And I’m not just talking about call centers. They have the potential to invent and develop things that we have become accustomed to seeing invented and developed here. And from the point of view of the United States as a country, it would be very interesting to see what happens in those countries. Because while they do have these concentrations of educated people, and middle class, and people who are even wealthy and entrepreneurial, they also still are, in the majority, full of extremely poor, uneducated people who . . . who have a right to a future. And how they distribute their wealth, and how they go about taking care of their whole populations – particularly in the case of China which is, of course, not a free country – is gonna be a fascinating situation. And then I think we have this . . . And here I’m drawing on both my many years covering foreign policy and my more recent history covering technology. But we have this bizarre, I think, counter-intuitive situation in which the following is happening. As I’ve already said twice, I think people now have access to more accurate, real information about the world than they have ever, ever had. You could be sitting in the middle of, you know, Siberia or, you know, Alberta or Patagonia; and if you have a computer connected to the Internet you can know a tremendous amount about what’s going on in the world. And yet at the very same time we have this rise in fundamentalism in all religions – not just Islam – in which people are rejecting science, becoming wedded to conspiracy theories instead of what’s really happening, and I think kind of retreating from the complexity all around them. You know there’s this fire hose of information out there and people . . . some people. Not everyone, but some people’s reaction is to say, “I can’t deal with it. I don’t trust it. It must not be true. I’m going back to believing these . . . whatever this guy who is my follower . . . or leader says.” It could be a religious leader, a political leader or whatever. This is what they’re believing. One aspect of that, Islamic terrorism, is especially dangerous because even though it doesn’t represent most of Islam, it is unlike most of the other fundamentalists. It’s armed. It runs some countries, and it has managed to kill a lot of people, both its own . . . both their own people and people here in our country, and elsewhere in the west. So it’s easy to conceive a situation where you get into chaotic, military, and conflict situations that could kind of put at least a temporary halt to progress in education, and technology and other things. And I worry about that.

Question: Is technology shifting traditional power structures?

Transcript: Yeah. I think that’s . . . I think that’s ridiculous. People have such a short memory of history. First of all the Kremlin, even in Russia’s reduced state, has, the last time I checked, thousands of actual operational nuclear warheads. So when you have the power to push buttons and destroy entire countries and hundreds of millions of people, that’s actually more power than even Sergey and Larry have at Google, I think, by at least some measures. Secondly people forget that there have been business tycoons . . . I mean you know the robber barons, the people that owned the railroads. John D. Rockefeller owned most of the oil in the country at one time. That’s pretty good power. So yeah Bill Gates, and Steve ___________, and the guys that run Microsoft are really powerful. Steve Jobs is really powerful. The Google guys are really powerful, you know? The flavor du jour – whoever is hot on the Internet – is really powerful. The Internet itself is obviously really powerful, although it’s not controlled by anyone. So you know there have always been multiple centers of power. There’s cultural power. There’s military power. There’s economic power. There’s business power. We have all those things today. They’re just different and different names. And I have thoroughly enjoyed being able to cover in one part of my career some of those power centers; and now in another part of my career some others where there’s a lot of innovation. I would say the Kremlin was very innovative. I wouldn’t say the White House was very innovative. I think it’s great fun to talk to people who have fascinating new ideas, and the inclination and resources to try them out. But I don’t think it’s a new thing that we have business figures who have a lot of power.

Question: How is technology changing the political landscape?

Transcript: Well we certainly haven’t seen the full impact of it because, as I said, we’re just in the very beginning of this revolution. I would also point out to you that if you actually do the research, you will find that these kinds of articles have been written, and this kind of belief has been stated emphatically in the last two elections . . . presidential election cycles, maybe the last three. “Oh my god, the Internet is going to be the thing that changes the whole outcome. Oh my god, this is gonna draw everyone under 25 into the voting booth. Oh my god, a complete insurgent could come in and raise the kind of money that could make a real difference in a campaign.” You know it’s been an important factor, something campaigns have to pay attention to in the last two election cycles; and yet it’s hard to say that it had any material impact on the outcome in the end. The best example we all know is Howard Dean, who was almost entirely an Internet phenomenon and raised a lot of money, and then wasn’t able to translate that into votes and workers on the ground. Some of the Republican candidates in the last presidential election also had very effective Internet operations. You’re seeing it again now with Obama, and Hilary Clinton, and Giuliani, and Romney. And so it’s become a part of the mix for these guys. Every campaign has serious web sites, and serious teams of web organizers, web developers, web bloggers, you know web fundraising people. And it’s arrived. It’s here. It’s part of the process. But I think the jury is out on whether it can be game changing. I don’t . . . I imagine someday it’ll be game changing, but I don’t know that it’ll be this election cycle or not.

Question: How is technology changing the way we live?

Transcript: I also think the less you hear the word “Internet”, the more integrated into our lives it will be. I compare the Internet to the electrical grid. The electrical grid is all around you. It’s in your home. It’s in your office. It’s in your hotel room. And there is an uncounted number of things that plug into the electrical grid. The television cameras we’re using to record this interview plug into the electrical grid. So does the toaster oven, and the electric toothbrush, and the hairdryer that you might have used this morning. But you did not think to yourself when you put your toast in your toaster oven, “Hey, I’m using the electrical grid.” Or “I’m going to use the electrical grid.” It would be laughable for you to say that. And I think the same thing is going to happen with the Internet. The Internet . . . Instead of being seen, as a lot of people do, as some sort of activity you perform on a device that happens to be called a “personal computer”, the Internet is really an enormous grid or ocean of information – communications services, commerce, marketing, entertainment, all of these things. Information. And there are gonna be innumerable devices that will connect to it, tap into it, and just use enough of it to perform whatever function it is they are good at doing, in whatever context people want to use them in. So for instance, you wouldn’t necessarily expect a pocket-sized device to do the same thing as a device with a larger display. You wouldn’t necessarily be surprised, I think, in 10 years that your microwave oven is plugged into the Internet. I think it will be. On the other hand, it won’t be plugged into the Internet for the purpose of you getting your e-mail on the door of the microwave. It’ll be plugged in so that when you put a package of frozen food in there, the oven will just read the barcode. It will have a connection to the Internet. It will have a database that will be constantly updated, and it will be able to properly heat up the food. That’s the only thing it will need the Internet to do, but it will need the Internet to do it. So the Internet is a grid. Many devices, many kinds of software, many kinds of services running on those devices, all of which take advantage of the grid. And that means that in 10 years . . . Already this is true to some extent, but it’s gonna become universal in 10 years. Whenever you watch television, you’re gonna be on the Internet. Whenever you make a phone call, you’re gonna be on the Internet. And nobody’s gonna say, “I’m gonna go online tonight and look this up.” You know I think in 10 or 15 years when you see movies from today where people say, “I found this online. I’m going on the Web. Let’s go online and check it out,” people are gonna laugh because we’re always gonna be online. And so those are some of the big things that I think are going on.

Question: Is Web 2.0 and social networking over-hyped?

Transcript: Oh, well there’s an overhype. I’ve never seen a time in high tech when there wasn’t an enormous hype machine around it. I think in general, you know, these companies get their funding. They open their office. They hire some engineers, and then they immediately hire some PR people. And so part of my role is to be kind of the anti-hypster if I can do that. But yeah, oh sure. I mean every single web site, every single gadget, every single new model of computer that comes out is grossly overhyped. And I do believe that Wall Street . . . the professional investment analysts on Wall Street are often shockingly badly informed, and have many times declared particular products or technologies to be the world-changer when they’re not. So oh yeah. There’s always . . . There’s always more hype around this stuff than is justified.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Question: How did you get into your line of work?

Transcript: Well I went to a public high school in Warwick, Rhode Island. And you know I was a little bit involved in journalism in the school, but not much. And the Providence Journal Bulletin, which was the name of the newspaper – still . . . today I think it’s just the Providence Journal – was a, you know, a small city newspaper probably with a circulation of a couple of hundred thousand. So it wasn’t a tiny town newspaper, but it obviously wasn’t a major metropolitan city. But it was a very high quality newspaper. It was well regarded. It had won some Pulitzer prizes. People who had worked there had gone on to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and places like that. But they had a problem. They had an economic problem, which is afternoon newspapers were dying. They couldn’t get a lot of advertising for their afternoon newspapers. And in particular they had a Saturday afternoon newspaper which, you know, who reads the newspaper on Saturday afternoons? So they decided to take a bunch of space in that paper and devote it to teenagers, because the other thing that, of course, was going on at that time was establishment authority figures like politicians and newspaper editors were thinking, “We better figure out what’s going on with these students,” because the students were running around having demonstrations and all that ‘60s stuff. So in 19 . . . I guess it must have been ’64 and ’65, they started this experiment. And they gave . . . They provided space for a column for every high school in their metro area. And it was not a democratic process. The English department or the principal or somebody in all these high schools appointed the columnists. And in my case, out of the blue they asked me to do it. And they asked me to do it together with the guy who was, at the time, my best friend in high school. And it’s somebody whose name is now well known. It’s James Woods, the Hollywood actor who went to high school with me. And he and I started to write this little column together. It was a completely uncontroversial column. All of them were. It was just like what was going on at the school; but not really what was going on. It was sort of officially what was going on. And he was then and now very interested in acting. So he dropped out of doing this after about a month and I kept it up on my own. And at the end . . . And I got bitten by the bug of journalism. I used to have to take a bus and go down to the headquarters of the newspaper and turn in my copy. And the editor would . . . Somebody would edit it, and explain to me why they were editing it in a certain way, and how I could improve it and all of that. And it was just kind of exciting to me. And unbeknownst to me, because nobody had told me this, they actually had a prize for the student whose high school column was the best in the area at the end of every school year. And the prize was that you were flown out to Chicago to Northwestern University to the journalism school where they had a “summer institute” they called it. I think they still have it for high school kids interested in becoming reporters and editors. And I won this thing, and it was the most bizarre thing because I didn’t even know it was a contest. And all of a sudden they say, “Hey, you won this.” So I . . . It was my first plane flight. It was my first trip west of Connecticut. And it was my first time really on a college campus. And it was a fabulous experience, and it just sort of cemented my feeling that I wanted to be a journalist.

Question: When did technology first spark your interest?

Transcript: Not ‘til much, much later. I had no . . . I have . . . I am not an engineer. I am not a computer science degree person. I majored in . . . I went to Brandeis University undergrad. I majored in politics. Not political science – politics. And I worked on the school paper. I was a stringer for The New York Times in the summers. I worked at the Providence Journal first as a copy boy, then I was a reporter. And I was working my way to a career in journalism. And I went to Columbia University’s grad school of journalism and got a Masters, and I was hired by The Wall Street Journal. And what I really wanted to do was go to Washington and cover politics and policy, and I did that eventually. Not immediately, but after a few years they transferred me to their Washington bureau. I actually started in the Detroit bureau covering the automobile industry and organized labor. And so I spent over 20 years at the Journal, first for a few years covering business and labor, and then covering Washington beats. I was the Chief Pentagon Correspondent . . . national security, foreign policy, economics. I was the Deputy Bureau Chief. None of this had anything to do with technology. But somewhere along the way, I picked up as my hobby computers. I knew nothing about engineering, but I just was fascinated by it. And I bought a little . . . I think it cost me . . . a $100 computer called the Timex Sinclair around 1981. And I began tinkering with it. Learned a little bit of basic programming, and I just did it at home on the weekends and at night as a hobby. And I began to . . . Then I bought a much more expensive computer in around, I wanna say 1983 or so, something like that. I bought an Apple IIe, and that cost me like thousands of dollars for the computer and the disk drives and all that kind of stuff. It didn’t have a hard disk, of course. Eventually I bought a hard disk for it which also was unbelievably expensive. And I think what fascinated me about it was the communications aspects of it, which were very crude in those days; but you could . . . I was very early on what used to be called bulletin boards. You know, like forums that you would . . . you see today on the Web. But they were all text, and they were just local. And then I got on CompuServe. And then I got on AOL. And almost as soon as the Internet became publically available I was on that. So it was my hobby, and that’s how I got into it. And you know eventually I came up with the idea to stop writing about serious, global, national security kind of things which I was doing, and to start a new and different kind of technology column.

Question: When did you start writing a technology column?

Transcript: So in 1990, I was . . . By then my designation at the Journal was National Security Correspondent. And at that time at the paper, what that meant was that you were the person in charge of covering really the Cold War, U.S.-Soviet relations, NATO and that sort of stuff. I had a very good colleague whose title was Diplomatic Correspondent, but he covered more Latin America, Central America, Asia, not . . . Obviously we had bureaus on the ground in those places. He covered U.S. policy toward those areas of the world; but I covered U.S.-Soviet, which was the big deal. Remember this was in the first Bush administration, the first President Bush. And this was the concluding few years of the Cold War – the end of a 50 year struggle against communism; and the collapse of communism; the liberation of Eastern Europe; the reunification of Germany. And I got to cover all those things, and it was amazing. Obviously we had reporters on the ground in Berlin and Moscow, and places who wrote a tremendous amount. But I got to cover kind of the U.S. diplomatic and military end of these things. I also was involved in covering the Gulf War in 1991 for the Journal on our team – not in the region, but in Washington in terms of the policy, and the strategy, and the diplomacy, and lining up the coalition and all that stuff. So I was doing all that, and I was motivated to change what I was doing. And the reason was partly personal and partly journalistic. Personal reason was I was traveling all the time, all over the world on the airplane of the Secretary of State, who was at the time James Baker. And it was phenomenally exciting and a great professional opportunity, but I wasn’t seeing my kids enough. I have two sons who were, at the time, I wanna say 12 and 9 or something like that. And the trips were not within your control. If the Secretary of State decided . . . or the President decided to send him to go meet with Gorbachev and some . . . the King of Saudi Arabia and five other people, they would call and say, “We’re leaving. Are you gonna cover this?” And if you didn’t cover it, the newspaper would lose its seat on the airplane. They only had a very limited number of press seats, and the big news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, got a claim to one of those seats; but you would lost it if you didn’t go. So that meant you couldn’t plan things like being there for the school play, or whatever it is that your kids needed you for. The other problem was once you left, you didn’t exactly know when you were coming back. They would say, “Oh we’re leaving on Tuesday. We’ll be back on Saturday.” But in fact on Friday, the President might call and say, “I need you to do three more cities,” and so the trip would go on until Monday. And again professionally, it was very wonderful and exciting. And I still had the occasional reunion with the people I traveled with. But it was not good for you as a father. So that was one reason I began to think about changing jobs.

And the other was I knew a great deal about computers, personal computers. And I knew that it was way too hard to use them and way too hard to learn about them. And I knew that it was about to explode and democratize, and that many millions of people were gonna get these things or have to use them at work who weren’t up to that point. Obviously there were a lot of people using them; but in 1990 it was just about to like, I don’t know, grow 10-fold or 20-fold or whatever, and that there would be a lot of other digital devices. We were beginning to see some digital . . . some very crude digital cameras, some very crude cell phones, and I thought, you know, there’s a lot of columns . . . A lot of newspapers have columns written about this, but they’re written by geeks for geeks for the most part. And there were . . . And they are reverential about the industry. And so in 1990 I went to the managing editor of the Journal. His name was Norm Pearlstine who later went on to be the Editor-in-Chief of Time, Inc. and to do some other things. And I said, “I have an idea for us to do a computer technology column, but I wanna flip the formula on its head that the other newspapers are using. I wanna write it as a champion of the non-geeks. I wanna write it for the smart, busy person who has absolutely no interest in how these things work, never ever wants to be a techie, but just wants to get results.” And by results that could be anything from, you know, building a spreadsheet to playing a video game. It didn’t matter to me. Or music or whatever it was, but they wanted the thing to work the way it was supposed to work with a very minimum of training and hassle and all of that. And the other thing I wanted to do was be tough on the industry. Instead of being reverential toward Intel, or Microsoft, or Apple or whoever it was, I wanted to be critical when I felt they weren’t meeting the needs of this very, very large group of readers who were not techies. And Pearlstine loved the idea, but said, “I can’t spare you from covering national security in the middle of, you know . . . The whole world is changing, so you gotta give me at least another year on that and then we’ll do this other thing.” So we went through all the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We went through the Gulf War in ’91 . . . in the fall of ’91. About 60 days before the Soviet Union collapsed, they let me switch over to writing this column. And the column was not only for us, different in that it was a regular, weekly technology column; but it was different because they had resisted having opinions – subjective opinion – in the news pages of the Journal, even clearly identified. And I personally am very much against mixing the editorial pages of newspapers with the news pages; or the editorial views of television networks with the news reporting. But it’s an old tradition to demarcate that this is a column. This is your sports article on the game. This is your sports columnist. And the readers understand that the columnist is an opinion guy, even though he’s not on the editorial page. Or your movie reviewer is an opinion person. You may have an article . . . a feature article, a news article about the making of some movie, and that’s expected to be objective. The guy that reviews the movie is expected to be subjective. So I was essentially proposing to become a movie reviewer of technology things, and the Journal had never had anything quite like this in its news pages. And there was some resistance starting the column. There was some resistance based on, “Why should we give all this attention to technology?” And there was some resistance based on the idea that this was gonna be a high profile, opinionated feature. But it became popular very quickly, and everybody was happy with it after a short while.

Question: What are the most interesting trends in technology today?

Transcript: Well I think there are always . . . I mean the lucky thing about having this is the thing you write about every week . . . several times a week is that it’s always changing. I think if I were to just pick two or three interesting trends right now, one I think is the cell phone, or the device formerly known as the cell phone, which really has less and less to do with making voice calls. The latest example is the iPhone from Apple, which is really a rather powerful little computer you can hold in your pocket. The Blackberry is also a computer. The Trio is also a computer. But the iPhone sort of takes it to a new level. The evolution of that is gonna be fascinating to watch. I believe the personal computer as we have known it has already peaked. I don’t mean that it’s going away. It’s still gonna be the dominant device; but I think it has peaked because I think there are gonna be a lot of other devices, and a lot of other methods for doing the digital things we have thought you needed a computer to do – a personal computer. So that whole cell phone thing is one.

Question: What trends are on the horizon?

Transcript: Closely related is the whole question of wireless networks. Basically they have been the province of huge, monopolistic, utility-minded companies who I like to compare to Soviet ministries who I think have tried to control far too much of the chain. The hardware, the software, everything you wanna do on a device on somebody’s cellular network has, at least in the United States, and at least up to this point, been heavily controllable by Verizon, and AT&T, and Sprint, and T-Mobile. And I think that’s about to blow up. I don’t mean that it’s gonna blow up . . . you’re gonna wake up one day and the whole system is gonna be blown up. I mean I think we are just on the verge of seeing power flow away from those companies and flow to either tech companies like Google, or Apple, or companies like that; or consumers, or some combination of both. I think Wi-Fi and WiMax and some of these other technologies have the possibility of blowing that open, and I think you’re gonna see more freedom in the creation of software and services on those devices. So that’s another big thing.

Question: Can old media survive the digital revolution?

Transcript: Well I actually think the digitalization of the world, or the digital tidal wave that’s sweeping through the world is touching every kind of industry and walk of life. I don’t care if you’re a pre-school teacher, a parish priest, the CEO of General Motors, or a newspaper publisher or editor. It’s touching your life. The media companies, whether they’re . . . it’s entertainment or information have been especially hard hit because . . . by the change because the Internet is a great platform for media. Really if you think about it, despite all the hype about video on the Internet and the fact that these videos will be on the Internet, it is still today as we speak in September of 2007 overwhelmingly a text medium – overwhelmingly a text medium. And so it’s a direct competitor for newspapers and magazines. And newspapers and magazines have not been the best managed companies, no matter how good their journalism is. And they have not necessarily been the most entrepreneurial and flexible companies, but they have been hard hit. I don’t believe journalism as we know it is going away at all. In fact I think all the evidence is it’s booming and expanding. But journalism as done only by a small group of professional journalists; and only on dead trees; or only on, you know, official television networks . . . that kind of journalism is being radically, radically transformed and challenged by journalism carried on the Internet. But it’s still journalism.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: But we have this bizarre, I think, counter-intuitive situation in which the following is happening. As I’ve already said twice, I think people now have access to more accurate, real information about the world than they have ever, ever had. You could be sitting in the middle of, you know, Siberia or, you know, Alberta or Patagonia; and if you have a computer connected to the Internet you can know a tremendous amount about what’s going on in the world. And yet at the very same time we have this rise in fundamentalism in all religions – not just Islam – in which people are rejecting science, becoming wedded to conspiracy theories instead of what’s really happening, and I think kind of retreating from the complexity all around them. You know there’s this fire hose of information out there and people . . . some people. Not everyone, but some people’s reaction is to say, “I can’t deal with it. I don’t trust it. It must not be true. I’m going back to believing these . . . whatever this guy who is my follower . . . or leader says.” It could be a religious leader, a political leader or whatever. This is what they’re believing. One aspect of that, Islamic terrorism, is especially dangerous because even though it doesn’t represent most of Islam, it is unlike most of the other fundamentalists. It’s armed. It runs some countries, and it has managed to kill a lot of people, both its own . . . both their own people and people here in our country, and elsewhere in the west. So it’s easy to conceive a situation where you get into chaotic, military, and conflict situations that could kind of put at least a temporary halt to progress in education, and technology and other things. And I worry about that.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

west. So it’s easy to conceive a situation where you get into chaotic, military, and conflict situations that could kind of put at least a temporary halt to progress in education, and technology and other things. And I worry about that.

Transcript: Capitalism has a lot of problems. There are a lot of inequities. There are a lot of things about it that are imperfect and should be tweaked and should be fixed. But capitalism is the . . . you know has created a . . . a world in those countries that practice it where if you have a great idea, you can raise some money and you can go do it. And certainly the personal computer and consumer digital revolution of the last 30 years would never have happened if it weren’t for free markets, people’s ability to . . . from any walk of life, to come up with an idea, do it in a garage, get a little money from some venture capitalist or somebody, and then bring it to market. And if it fails – and most of them do fail, you know – you go try something else. And if it succeeds, you could become the wealthiest guy in the world like Bill Gates did. And I think you can’t overstate the importance of a free market economic system, and particularly the way it has been practiced in the United States where people are willing . . . Both technologists and investors have been willing to take risks. Sometimes you’ve lost money on those risks. We saw it in the dot com bubble and then bust of just six or seven years ago. But overall, it’s been an extremely invigorating and healthy thing. And even in other capitalist countries where risk taking was harder, and where failure was much more of a kind of final thing, they didn’t . . . they didn’t spawn the kinds of ideas, and products, and technologies that we did. Because it’s not a sin to fail in the United States, certainly not in tech. I can tell you that people come to see me every day with companies and products who came to see me five years before for some completely different company and product which may have failed. Maybe it succeeded, but a lot of times it failed. And I don’t say, “Well I’m not gonna see that guy because he failed in his last company.” And the venture capitalists don’t say, “Well you failed in your last company. Why should we even listen to you?” No, they say, “Okay, you learned something from that failure. Let’s listen to your new thing.”

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: But it’s perfectly obvious that climate change is an enormous issue for everyone on the planet; that every kind of personal, and governmental, and commercial, and industrial activity on the planet is gonna have to change so that we don’t destroy the planet. Climate change, environmentalism, the whole green thing in general . . . And you can already see a lot of the same venture capital and investment money that was the lifeblood of high tech, some of that money now going to projects that are an attempt to apply technology to making the world cleaner and being greener.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: Well I think a huge part of it . . . There have been two huge . . . There have been two huge contributors to it, I think. And I actually believe . . . This may be a little different than the last giant cycle of technological innovation when I think things were a lot less formal in America. One huge cycle has been education – high quality institutions of higher education. Now it’s not always true. We’ve gotta remember, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – who are probably two of the most famous high tech figures of the last 30 years – are both college dropouts. Michael Dell, who is not really a technology figure but runs a big technology company, is a college dropout. And even Sergey Brin and Larry Page who founded Google – while they are certainly not college dropouts, did drop out of their PhD programs and never finished their PhDs. Having said that, it’s obvious that the last several waves of innovation in digital technology – that kind of thing that I write about – have been generated by higher education institutions of high quality. The pre-PC era, a reason that a lot of those companies were clustered around Boston was MIT. We still have companies being spun out of MIT today. You may have heard of I Robot, you know, which makes __________ vacuum and a bunch of actually military robots. They’re an MIT spinoff. There is a company spun off by MIT that are working on, you know, basically electronic paper and a number of other things. But the PC revolution, Stanford played a much bigger role in that. So a lot of, you know . . . Yahoo, Google, quite a few other of those Silicon Valley companies . . . The reason Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley is Stanford. Obviously not everyone went to Stanford, but it has been a huge catalyst; an area that at one time – I think as recently as 30 or 35 years ago – was primarily a fruit and flower growing area, and now it’s called Silicon Valley.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: Yeah. I think that’s . . . I think that’s ridiculous. People have such a short memory of history. First of all the Kremlin, even in Russia’s reduced state, has, the last time I checked, thousands of actual operational nuclear warheads. So when you have the power to push buttons and destroy entire countries and hundreds of millions of people, that’s actually more power than even Sergey and Larry have at Google, I think, by at least some measures. Secondly people forget that there have been business tycoons . . . I mean you know the robber barons, the people that owned the railroads. John D. Rockefeller owned most of the oil in the country at one time. That’s pretty good power. So yeah Bill Gates, and Steve ___________, and the guys that run Microsoft are really powerful. Steve Jobs is really powerful. The Google guys are really powerful, you know? The flavor du jour – whoever is hot on the Internet – is really powerful. The Internet itself is obviously really powerful, although it’s not controlled by anyone. So you know there have always been multiple centers of power. There’s cultural power. There’s military power. There’s economic power. There’s business power. We have all those things today. They’re just different and different names. And I have thoroughly enjoyed being able to cover in one part of my career some of those power centers; and now in another part of my career some others where there’s a lot of innovation. I would say the Kremlin was very innovative. I wouldn’t say the White House was very innovative. I think it’s great fun to talk to people who have fascinating new ideas, and the inclination and resources to try them out. But I don’t think it’s a new thing that we have business figures who have a lot of power.

We obviously still have no idea just what the rise of China and India means. You know they have enormous economic potential, including, by the way, a significant high tech potential. And I’m not just talking about call centers. They have the potential to invent and develop things that we have become accustomed to seeing invented and developed here. And from the point of view of the United States as a country, it would be very interesting to see what happens in those countries. Because while they do have these concentrations of educated people, and middle class, and people who are even wealthy and entrepreneurial, they also still are, in the majority, full of extremely poor, uneducated people who . . . who have a right to a future. And how they distribute their wealth, and how they go about taking care of their whole populations – particularly in the case of China which is, of course, not a free country – is gonna be a fascinating situation.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: You know there is a conventional wisdom kind of idea that this is like the greatest period of technological change in history. And certainly by some measures, there have been immense changes that are hard to imagine having been matched in the past. As we said earlier in this interview, I don’t know that there’s been a period of time when people have so rapidly gained access to so much information. But there have been other big eras where technology changed very fast. The beginning of the last century when the automobile, the airplane, the telegraph . . . all these things came along very quickly. The telephone. Even further back in history, various developments in medicine, and sanitation, and other things that really had huge outcomes in the way people lived and worked. And what gets me up every morning is that I am living in one of those periods, even if it’s not . . . It doesn’t matter to me that it’s the biggest or the fastest or whatever. It’s one of those periods of amazing technological change.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: Well we certainly haven’t seen the full impact of it because, as I said, we’re just in the very beginning of this revolution. I would also point out to you that if you actually do the research, you will find that these kinds of articles have been written, and this kind of belief has been stated emphatically in the last two elections . . . presidential election cycles, maybe the last three. “Oh my god, the Internet is going to be the thing that changes the whole outcome. Oh my god, this is gonna draw everyone under 25 into the voting booth. Oh my god, a complete insurgent could come in and raise the kind of money that could make a real difference in a campaign.” You know it’s been an important factor, something campaigns have to pay attention to in the last two election cycles; and yet it’s hard to say that it had any material impact on the outcome in the end. The best example we all know is Howard Dean, who was almost entirely an Internet phenomenon and raised a lot of money, and then wasn’t able to translate that into votes and workers on the ground. Some of the Republican candidates in the last presidential election also had very effective Internet operations. You’re seeing it again now with Obama, and Hilary Clinton, and Giuliani, and Romney. And so it’s become a part of the mix for these guys. Every campaign has serious web sites, and serious teams of web organizers, web developers, web bloggers, you know web fundraising people. And it’s arrived. It’s here. It’s part of the process. But I think the jury is out on whether it can be game changing. I don’t . . . I imagine someday it’ll be game changing, but I don’t know that it’ll be this election cycle or not.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: Well I actually think the digitalization of the world, or the digital tidal wave that’s sweeping through the world is touching every kind of industry and walk of life. I don’t care if you’re a pre-school teacher, a parish priest, the CEO of General Motors, or a newspaper publisher or editor. It’s touching your life. The media companies, whether they’re . . . it’s entertainment or information have been especially hard hit because . . . by the change because the Internet is a great platform for media. Really if you think about it, despite all the hype about video on the Internet and the fact that these videos will be on the Internet, it is still today as we speak in September of 2007 overwhelmingly a text medium – overwhelmingly a text medium. And so it’s a direct competitor for newspapers and magazines. And newspapers and magazines have not been the best managed companies, no matter how good their journalism is. And they have not necessarily been the most entrepreneurial and flexible companies, but they have been hard hit. I don’t believe journalism as we know it is going away at all. In fact I think all the evidence is it’s booming and expanding. But journalism as done only by a small group of professional journalists; and only on dead trees; or only on, you know, official television networks . . . that kind of journalism is being radically, radically transformed and challenged by journalism carried on the Internet. But it’s still journalism.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: Well I think there are always . . . I mean the lucky thing about having this is the thing you write about every week . . . several times a week is that it’s always changing. I think if I were to just pick two or three interesting trends right now, one I think is the cell phone, or the device formerly known as the cell phone, which really has less and less to do with making voice calls. The latest example is the iPhone from Apple, which is really a rather powerful little computer you can hold in your pocket. The Blackberry is also a computer. The Trio is also a computer. But the iPhone sort of takes it to a new level. The evolution of that is gonna be fascinating to watch. I believe the personal computer as we have known it has already peaked. I don’t mean that it’s going away. It’s still gonna be the dominant device; but I think it has peaked because I think there are gonna be a lot of other devices, and a lot of other methods for doing the digital things we have thought you needed a computer to do – a personal computer. So that whole cell phone thing is one.

Closely related is the whole question of wireless networks. Basically they have been the province of huge, monopolistic, utility-minded companies who I like to compare to Soviet ministries who I think have tried to control far too much of the chain. The hardware, the software, everything you wanna do on a device on somebody’s cellular network has, at least in the United States, and at least up to this point, been heavily controllable by Verizon, and AT&T, and Sprint, and T-Mobile. And I think that’s about to blow up. I don’t mean that it’s gonna blow up . . . you’re gonna wake up one day and the whole system is gonna be blown up. I mean I think we are just on the verge of seeing power flow away from those companies and flow to either tech companies like Google, or Apple, or companies like that; or consumers, or some combination of both. I think Wi-Fi and WiMax and some of these other technologies have the possibility of blowing that open, and I think you’re gonna see more freedom in the creation of software and services on those devices. So that’s another big thing.

I also think the less you hear the word “Internet”, the more integrated into our lives it will be. I compare the Internet to the electrical grid. The electrical grid is all around you. It’s in your home. It’s in your office. It’s in your hotel room. And there is an uncounted number of things that plug into the electrical grid. The television cameras we’re using to record this interview plug into the electrical grid. So does the toaster oven, and the electric toothbrush, and the hairdryer that you might have used this morning. But you did not think to yourself when you put your toast in your toaster oven, “Hey, I’m using the electrical grid.” Or “I’m going to use the electrical grid.” It would be laughable for you to say that. And I think the same thing is going to happen with the Internet. The Internet . . . Instead of being seen, as a lot of people do, as some sort of activity you perform on a device that happens to be called a “personal computer”, the Internet is really an enormous grid or ocean of information – communications services, commerce, marketing, entertainment, all of these things. Information. And there are gonna be innumerable devices that will connect to it, tap into it, and just use enough of it to perform whatever function it is they are good at doing, in whatever context people want to use them in. So for instance, you wouldn’t necessarily expect a pocket-sized device to do the same thing as a device with a larger display. You wouldn’t necessarily be surprised, I think, in 10 years that your microwave oven is plugged into the Internet. I think it will be. On the other hand, it won’t be plugged into the Internet for the purpose of you getting your e-mail on the door of the microwave. It’ll be plugged in so that when you put a package of frozen food in there, the oven will just read the barcode. It will have a connection to the Internet. It will have a database that will be constantly updated, and it will be able to properly heat up the food. That’s the only thing it will need the Internet to do, but it will need the Internet to do it. So the Internet is a grid. Many devices, many kinds of software, many kinds of services running on those devices, all of which take advantage of the grid. And that means that in 10 years . . . Already this is true to some extent, but it’s gonna become universal in 10 years. Whenever you watch television, you’re gonna be on the Internet. Whenever you make a phone call, you’re gonna be on the Internet. And nobody’s gonna say, “I’m gonna go online tonight and look this up.” You know I think in 10 or 15 years when you see movies from today where people say, “I found this online. I’m going on the Web. Let’s go online and check it out,” people are gonna laugh because we’re always gonna be online. And so those are some of the big things that I think are going on.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Question: How is technology changing the way we live?

Transcript: Well first of all, when you say “technology”, you gotta realize that that’s a ridiculously broad and vague term. Bio technology is gonna be immense. There’s all kinds of other tech . . . I deal with what you might call digital technology, or information technology. Well it already has changed the world. I mean you know where do you wanna begin? I mean it’s changed the world in every way. People are always connected. People are always on the grid. There are very good things about that. There are very bad things about that. It’s no longer the case that if you live in a physical neighborhood and don’t go into some other kinds of physical neighborhood, you’ll never meet other kinds of people. There are no boundaries anymore . . . digitally at least. You can meet people from the other side of town where you might never have gone 50 years ago. And you can meet people from the other side of the world. These are hugely powerful and transformative things. You can, at the . . . I can remember . . . Geez, when I was using CompuServe, which was an all-text, very crude thing on my old Apple II, I can remember how thrilling it was that I could go look up something in some library from . . . I think it was Poland or somewhere that had been put online. And you say to yourself, “I’m sitting in my house, and I’m able to go look this thing up.” So I think sometimes we take this for granted. It’s happened so fast. But in all of human history, there is no doubt that only in the last 20 years, or even 10 years, have average people gained the power to tap so much of the world’s knowledge. And we don’t really even know what the implications of that are gonna be down the line.

There’s also tremendous potential for harm. I mean there’s . . . We . . . We . . . And I’m not just . . . I mean there’s fraud. There’s identity theft. There’s child predators out there who find it easier to snare victims because it’s all anonymous, and it’s all digital, and they can pretend to be anyone they want. But there’s even subtler things that you have to wonder about. Are people sitting in their houses looking at screens instead of going out and meeting people and experiencing the world? Are the tools that we have developed for social networking, or even for, you know, sort of normal, innocent commercial marketing online, tools that could someday be used by some totalitarian figure, or dictator, or some new sort of Hitler or Stalin? Perfectly possible. I’m not predicting that, but I’m just saying these technologies are neutral. They are what people make of them. And I think we just have too little experience.

I also think the less you hear the word “Internet”, the more integrated into our lives it will be. I compare the Internet to the electrical grid. The electrical grid is all around you. It’s in your home. It’s in your office. It’s in your hotel room. And there is an uncounted number of things that plug into the electrical grid. The television cameras we’re using to record this interview plug into the electrical grid. So does the toaster oven, and the electric toothbrush, and the hairdryer that you might have used this morning. But you did not think to yourself when you put your toast in your toaster oven, “Hey, I’m using the electrical grid.” Or “I’m going to use the electrical grid.” It would be laughable for you to say that. And I think the same thing is going to happen with the Internet. The Internet

. . . Instead of being seen, as a lot of people do, as some sort of activity you perform on a device that happens to be called a “personal computer”, the Internet is really an enormous grid or ocean of information – communications services, commerce, marketing, entertainment, all of these things. Information. And there are gonna be innumerable devices that will connect to it, tap into it, and just use enough of it to perform whatever function it is they are good at doing, in whatever context people want to use them in. So for instance, you wouldn’t necessarily expect a pocket-sized device to do the same thing as a device with a larger display. You wouldn’t necessarily be surprised, I think, in 10 years that your microwave oven is plugged into the Internet. I think it will be. On the other hand, it won’t be plugged into the Internet for the purpose of you getting your e-mail on the door of the microwave. It’ll be plugged in so that when you put a package of frozen food in there, the oven will just read the barcode. It will have a connection to the Internet. It will have a database that will be constantly updated, and it will be able to properly heat up the food. That’s the only thing it will need the Internet to do, but it will need the Internet to do it. So the Internet is a grid. Many devices, many kinds of software, many kinds of services running on those devices, all of which take advantage of the grid. And that means that in 10 years . . . Already this is true to some extent, but it’s gonna become universal in 10 years. Whenever you watch television, you’re gonna be on the Internet. Whenever you make a phone call, you’re gonna be on the Internet. And nobody’s gonna say, “I’m gonna go online tonight and look this up.” You know I think in 10 or 15 years when you see movies from today where people say, “I found this online. I’m going on the Web. Let’s go online and check it out,” people are gonna laugh because we’re always gonna be online. And so those are some of the big things that I think are going on.

Question: Is social networking over-hyped?

Transcript: Oh, well there’s an overhype. I’ve never seen a time in high tech when there wasn’t an enormous hype machine around it. I think in general, you know, these companies get their funding. They open their office. They hire some engineers, and then they immediately hire some PR people. And so part of my role is to be kind of the anti-hypster if I can do that. But yeah, oh sure. I mean every single web site, every single gadget, every single new model of computer that comes out is grossly overhyped. And I do believe that Wall Street . . . the professional investment analysts on Wall Street are often shockingly badly informed, and have many times declared particular products or technologies to be the world-changer when they’re not. So oh yeah. There’s always . . . There’s always more hype around this stuff than is justified.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: I think if I were to just pick two or three interesting trends right now, one I think is the cell phone, or the device formerly known as the cell phone, which really has less and less to do with making voice calls. The latest example is the iPhone from Apple, which is really a rather powerful little computer you can hold in your pocket. The Blackberry is also a computer. The Trio is also a computer. But the iPhone sort of takes it to a new level. The evolution of that is gonna be fascinating to watch. I believe the personal computer as we have known it has already peaked. I don’t mean that it’s going away. It’s still gonna be the dominant device; but I think it has peaked because I think there are gonna be a lot of other devices, and a lot of other methods for doing the digital things we have thought you needed a computer to do – a personal computer.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: I love laughing at stories I read online, or in print, or on television, or wherever I see or read them where people make these grand predictions. I don’t think you can . . . In this digital technology business, you can’t predict more than two years out. And I’m not even sure you’re right about two years if you try to predict. So I’ve studiously stayed away from that in my columns. You gotta remember that we’re sitting here . . . It’s the year 2007. I don’t know when people will be seeing this. Presumably this will somewhere be in some archive online forever. But it’s the year 2007. The personal computer itself . . . the mass market personal computer that a normal person who is not a techie or an engineer could actually use is only 30 years old. That’s it. It’s 30 years old. The online service that is the predecessor to the Web; and consumer e-mail – not e-mail for a bunch of scientists or executives in a company, but wide consumer e-mail – are probably not even 20 years old. Or maybe they’re just about 20 years old. Instant messaging, same thing. So I mean when I first wrote about AOL . . . I wrote the first article in a national newspaper about AOL. It was 1992. I believe they had 200 employees and 200,000 members. That was in 1992. That was 15 years ago. So if you’re 25, 15 years sounds like a long time, but it really is not a long time. And so all of this is just very new. The Internet . . . the Worldwide Web is about 10 or 11 years old in terms of really any significant number of people using it. I mean the Internet itself is much older, of course, but it was only used by a small group of scientists and government people for many, many, many years. So we’re just in the first or second inning of this digital revolution, and we don’t really know where it’s gonna take us.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: So in 1990, I was . . . By then my designation at the Journal was National Security Correspondent. And at that time at the paper, what that meant was that you were the person in charge of covering really the Cold War, U.S.-Soviet relations, NATO and that sort of stuff. I had a very good colleague whose title was Diplomatic Correspondent, but he covered more Latin America, Central America, Asia, not . . . Obviously we had bureaus on the ground in those places. He covered U.S. policy toward those areas of the world; but I covered U.S.-Soviet, which was the big deal. Remember this was in the first Bush administration, the first President Bush. And this was the concluding few years of the Cold War – the end of a 50 year struggle against communism; and the collapse of communism; the liberation of Eastern Europe; the reunification of Germany. And I got to cover all those things, and it was amazing. Obviously we had reporters on the ground in Berlin and Moscow, and places who wrote a tremendous amount. But I got to cover kind of the U.S. diplomatic and military end of these things. I also was involved in covering the Gulf War in 1991 for the Journal on our team – not in the region, but in Washington in terms of the policy, and the strategy, and the diplomacy, and lining up the coalition and all that stuff. So I was doing all that, and I was motivated to change what I was doing. And the reason was partly personal and partly journalistic. Personal reason was I was traveling all the time, all over the world on the airplane of the Secretary of State, who was at the time James Baker. And it was phenomenally exciting and a great professional opportunity, but I wasn’t seeing my kids enough. I have two sons who were, at the time, I wanna say 12 and 9 or something like that. And the trips were not within your control. If the Secretary of State decided . . . or the President decided to send him to go meet with Gorbachev and some . . . the King of Saudi Arabia and five other people, they would call and say, “We’re leaving. Are you gonna cover this?” And if you didn’t cover it, the newspaper would lose its seat on the airplane. They only had a very limited number of press seats, and the big news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, got a claim to one of those seats; but you would lost it if you didn’t go. So that meant you couldn’t plan things like being there for the school play, or whatever it is that your kids needed you for. The other problem was once you left, you didn’t exactly know when you were coming back. They would say, “Oh we’re leaving on Tuesday. We’ll be back on Saturday.” But in fact on Friday, the President might call and say, “I need you to do three more cities,” and so the trip would go on until Monday. And again professionally, it was very wonderful and exciting. And I still had the occasional reunion with the people I traveled with. But it was not good for you as a father.

I personally am very much against mixing the editorial pages of newspapers with the news pages; or the editorial views of television networks with the news reporting. But it’s an old tradition to demarcate that this is a column. This is your sports article on the game. This is your sports columnist. And the readers understand that the columnist is an opinion guy, even though he’s not on the editorial page. Or your movie reviewer is an opinion person. You may have an article . . . a feature article, a news article about the making of some movie, and that’s expected to be objective. The guy that reviews the movie is expected to be subjective.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: I mean you know, if you’re 16 and you have a lot of time on your hands, you may want to screw around with trying to fix your Windows when it breaks. If you’re the same person and you’re 25, and you still are not afraid of the computer, and you have a lot of technical knowledge, you suddenly find you have a lot less time on your hands to goof around with it. And so it isn’t a question of being dumb, or smart, or intimidated, or not intimidated. It’s a question of you bought the laptop. When you open it up you expect it to come on. You expect it to connect to the Wi-Fi network. You expect it to get you to the web site. You expect it to deal with your e-mail. You expect to be able to play, you know, your favorite game on it. You expect it to be able to do Facebook and MySpace. And at the same time, if you want to or need to, you expect to be able to, you know, write a 50-page paper on it. That’s what they promise you when they sell you the computer. And they don’t promise you that you’re gonna be spending your time dealing with defragging the hard drive and, you know, updating the security program and all that other stuff. And so I have been laser focused on that. The first line of my first column was, “Personal computers are just too hard to use and it’s not your fault.” And I still think that’s true. And I think it’s true for cell phones, which are like personal computers 10 years ago. It’s true for most of these products.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Question: Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about the way the world is headed?

Transcript: I’m generally an optimist, but I think there’s a lot of things to worry about right now in the world.

Question: Where is technology headed?

Transcript: First of all, when you say “technology”, you gotta realize that that’s a ridiculously broad and vague term. Bio technology is gonna be immense. There’s all kinds of other tech . . . I deal with what you might call digital technology, or information technology. Well it already has changed the world. I mean you know where do you wanna begin? I mean it’s changed the world in every way. People are always connected. People are always on the grid. There are very good things about that. There are very bad things about that. It’s no longer the case that if you live in a physical neighborhood and don’t go into some other kinds of physical neighborhood, you’ll never meet other kinds of people. There are no boundaries anymore . . . digitally at least. You can meet people from the other side of town where you might never have gone 50 years ago. And you can meet people from the other side of the world. These are hugely powerful and transformative things. You can, at the . . . I can remember . . . Geez, when I was using CompuServe, which was an all-text, very crude thing on my old Apple II, I can remember how thrilling it was that I could go look up something in some library from . . . I think it was Poland or somewhere that had been put online. And you say to yourself, “I’m sitting in my house, and I’m able to go look this thing up.” So I think sometimes we take this for granted. It’s happened so fast. But in all of human history, there is no doubt that only in the last 20 years, or even 10 years, have average people gained the power to tap so much of the world’s knowledge. And we don’t really even know what the implications of that are gonna be down the line.

I love laughing at stories I read online, or in print, or on television, or wherever I see or read them where people make these grand predictions. I don’t think you can . . . In this digital technology business, you can’t predict more than two years out. And I’m not even sure you’re right about two years if you try to predict. So I’ve studiously stayed away from that in my columns. You gotta remember that we’re sitting here . . . It’s the year 2007. I don’t know when people will be seeing this. Presumably this will somewhere be in some archive online forever. But it’s the year 2007. The personal computer itself . . . the mass market personal computer that a normal person who is not a techie or an engineer could actually use is only 30 years old. That’s it. It’s 30 years old. The online service that is the predecessor to the Web; and consumer e-mail – not e-mail for a bunch of scientists or executives in a company, but wide consumer e-mail – are probably not even 20 years old. Or maybe they’re just about 20 years old. Instant messaging, same thing. So I mean when I first wrote about AOL . . . I wrote the first article in a national newspaper about AOL. It was 1992. I believe they had 200 employees and 200,000 members. That was in 1992. That was 15 years ago. So if you’re 25, 15 years sounds like a long time, but it really is not a long time. And so all of this is just very new. The Internet . . . the Worldwide Web is about 10 or 11 years old in terms of really any significant number of people using it. I mean the Internet itself is much older, of course, but it was only used by a small group of scientists and government people for many, many, many years. So we’re just in the first or second inning of this digital revolution, and we don’t really know where it’s gonna take us.

Question: What are the risks of technological innovation?

There’s also tremendous potential for harm. I mean there’s . . . We . . . We . . . And I’m not just . . . I mean there’s fraud. There’s identity theft. There’s child predators out there who find it easier to snare victims because it’s all anonymous, and it’s all digital, and they can pretend to be anyone they want. But there’s even subtler things that you have to wonder about. Are people sitting in their houses looking at screens instead of going out and meeting people and experiencing the world? Are the tools that we have developed for social networking, or even for, you know, sort of normal, innocent commercial marketing online, tools that could someday be used by some totalitarian figure, or dictator, or some new sort of Hitler or Stalin? Perfectly possible. I’m not predicting that, but I’m just saying these technologies are neutral. They are what people make of them. And I think we just have too little experience.

Question: Do you think the new web bubble will burst?

Transcript: I’m very fortunate in that I don’t pay the slightest attention to the stock market even though I work at the Wall Street Journal. Under our very tough ethics policy, you know I own . . . I don’t own a single share of stock in any company whose products I might write about. I can’t have any kind of financial relationship with them. So in terms of whether these companies are . . . stock prices are too high, I pay no attention to that.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

orld.

Do you think the new web bubble will burst?

MOSSBERG: I’m very fortunate in that I don’t pay the slightest attention to the stock market even though I work at the Wall Street Journal. Under our very tough ethics policy, you know I own . . . I don’t own a single share of stock in any company whose products I might write about. I can’t have any kind of financial relationship with them. So in terms of whether these companies are . . . stock prices are too high, I pay no attention to that.

Well first of all, when you say “technology”, you gotta realize that that’s a ridiculously broad and vague term.

HOPKINS: The technology you deal with.

MOSSBERG: Yeah. Because you know, bio tech . . .

HOPKINS: Bio tech, right.

MOSSBERG: Bio technology is gonna be immense. There’s all kinds of other tech . . . I deal with what you might call digital technology, or information technology. Well it already has changed the world. I mean you know where do you wanna begin? I mean it’s changed the world in every way. People are always connected. People are always on the grid. There are very good things about that. There are very bad things about that. It’s no longer the case that if you live in a physical neighborhood and don’t go into some other kinds of physical neighborhood, you’ll never meet other kinds of people. There are no boundaries anymore . . . digitally at least. You can meet people from the other side of town where you might never have gone 50 years ago. And you can meet people from the other side of the world. These are hugely powerful and transformative things. You can, at the . . . I can remember . . . Geez, when I was using CompuServe, which was an all-text, very crude thing on my old Apple II, I can remember how thrilling it was that I could go look up something in some library from . . . I think it was Poland or somewhere that had been put online. And you say to yourself, “I’m sitting in my house, and I’m able to go look this thing up.” So I think sometimes we take this for granted. It’s happened so fast. But in all of human history, there is no doubt that only in the last 20 years, or even 10 years, have average people gained the power to tap so much of the world’s knowledge. And we don’t really even know what the implications of that are gonna be down the line.

I love laughing at stories I read online, or in print, or on television, or wherever I see or read them where people make these grand predictions. I don’t think you can . . . In this digital technology business, you can’t predict more than two years out. And I’m not even sure you’re right about two years if you try to predict. So I’ve studiously stayed away from that in my columns. You gotta remember that we’re sitting here . . . It’s the year 2007. I don’t know when people will be seeing this. Presumably this will somewhere be in some archive online forever. But it’s the year 2007. The personal computer itself . . . the mass market personal computer that a normal person who is not a techie or an engineer could actually use is only 30 years old. That’s it. It’s 30 years old. The online service that is the predecessor to the Web; and consumer e-mail – not e-mail for a bunch of scientists or executives in a company, but wide consumer e-mail – are probably not even 20 years old. Or maybe they’re just about 20 years old. Instant messaging, same thing. So I mean when I first wrote about AOL . . . I wrote the first article in a national newspaper about AOL. It was 1992. I believe they had 200 employees and 200,000 members. That was in 1992. That was 15 years ago. So if you’re 25, 15 years sounds like a long time, but it really is not a long time. And so all of this is just very new. The Internet . . . the Worldwide Web is about 10 or 11 years old in terms of really any significant number of people using it. I mean the Internet itself is much older, of course, but it was only used by a small group of scientists and government people for many, many, many years. So we’re just in the first or second inning of this digital revolution, and we don’t really know where it’s gonna take us.

Transcription: Our whole family just totally idolized John F. Kennedy. And he was probably the biggest deal. That and a bunch of rock ‘n’ roll stars in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll because I was right at the right age for that to come along. But yeah, I think in terms of . . . In terms of a mass public figure, it would have been John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I was in high school. They . . . You know they announced it. They closed the school, and it was a sort of shattering of . . . I mean I had a very sort of happy childhood in the suburbs. My parents were not rich. They were totally just working class folks, but we believed – and I still do actually . . . but the American dream was a big deal to us. And the fact that he could be shot and killed, the President of the United States and particularly this guy, who we had been so excited about . . . I mean you have to understand I remember my entire extended family gathering to watch the Kennedy-Nixon debates as if it was a football game. And to . . . And we were all rooting for Kennedy. I mean this was an electric event. And for him to be murdered only a few years later was an incredibly depressing thing. And then in 1968 when I was in college, and I was, you know, marching against the Vietnam War and marching on Civil Rights demonstrations and things like that, for Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy to be killed was . . . I was horribly depressed. It was just . . . I could remember thinking about, “Geez, you know, can you even live in this country?” it was so awful. It was just awful.

Recorded on: 9/13/07