Wednesday, December 31, 1997

Tecnological highlights of 1997

By Dan Gillmor

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

(KRT)

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Like the migration of great animal herds, publications' annual best-of-the-year lists have become an inevitable late-December event. These lists do more than sum up the highlights of the previous 12 months. They're an early guess at what will last: the ideas and products and personalities and events that will make the history books.

So in the spirit of the season - and with the obvious caveat that I couldn't begin to see, much less try, every new product that appeared this year - here are my technology highlights of 1997. Let me know in 50 years how well I chose.

For genuine historical significance, I nominate voice-recognition. For the first time, affordable computer hardware and software were powerful enough that our machines could take dictation from people speaking in their normal voices. This was a crucial step toward the goal of making computers a more natural, and invisible, part of everyday life.

Happily, the top innovator in voice recognition came from an upstart, a small Massachusetts company called Dragon Systems (www.dragonsys.com). Its Naturally Speaking product outclassed the best efforts and much bigger budgets - at least so far - of behemoths like IBM and Microsoft.

Another pivotal event in 1997 was the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of the so-called Communications Decency Act, a law more obscene than what it would have made illegal. Under the guise of making cyberspace safe for children, the CDA, passed by craven lawmakers and signed by a craven president who surely knew they were spitting on the Constitution, would have led to an Internet fit only for children.

But the court saw the danger. It ruled that the Internet deserves the same free-speech protections we grant to printed publications. In the process, the justices proved savvier about technology and more protective of the First Amendment than some observers had feared.

What else made my 1997 highlights list? Here are the notables in three areas.

-We finally were able to buy affordable yet powerful personal computers. Microprocessors, the central brains of computers, continued on their astonishing cost-performance curve, and peripheral gear got cheaper along with them. But software, with few exceptions, didn't take advantage of the highest-end hardware.

As a result, when I replaced an aging 486 this year, I spent less than $1,300 but bought all the oomph I needed for the immediate future. I simply couldn't justify buying a top-of-the-line machine for twice the money.

The best savings news of the year, though, was the continuing drop in memory-chip prices. If you want to get more performance out of your computer, the best approach is almost always to add random-access memory, or RAM. Prices dropped so far in 1997 that this became the ultimate no-brainer upgrade.

-Plummeting prices for computer hardware also sparked the market for information appliances, inexpensive devices that handle several or a few chores easily and reliably. The coolest such gadget had to be Franklin Electronic Publishers' Rex PC Companion (www.franklin.com). This gadget, the size of a credit card, holds a personal calendar, phone and address book and notes. It's the logical evolution from last year's pivotal portable product, the Palm Pilot (www.palm.com), which was small enough to fit in a shirt pocket but is positively huge next to the Rex.

The Pilot's chief advantage remains its ability to accept data input from a pen-like stylus. The Rex, which doesn't let you input information except when synchronizing with a PC, has a bigger advantage: It fits in your wallet. I still have my Pilot, but I'm leaning toward the Rex as a standard carry-along device. Both, meanwhile, show the way toward tomorrow's info-appliances.

-Electronic commerce happened, though not in the way that has attracted the most media coverage. While consumer spending on the World Wide Web increased, the most interesting commerce took place in other ways.

For me, cyberspace became most useful commercially as a place for window-shopping. I researched many purchases, checked prices and, in a couple of cases, actually bought goods on the Net. I still did most of my shopping the more traditional ways: in stores and by phone. It's not that big a leap from the phone to the Net, of course.

The more important e-commerce was the kind most consumers never saw. Businesses bought and sold from each other in huge amounts on the Net. By yearend, Dell Computer said it was selling about $3 million worth of goods each day from its Web site.

Even more impressive, Cisco Systems was doing about 40 percent of all sales via the Web. That may be a natural thing for a networking company, but it's a superb proof of concept.

(Write Dan Gillmor at the Mercury News, 750 Ridder Park Dr., San Jose, Calif. 95190; e-mail: dgillmor(at)sjmercury.com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917.)

(c) 1997, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

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