When Andy Grove Foresaw The Cloud

"Where I live you require the patience of Job if you want ISDN. My local telephone company views ISDN as a bad dream which it wishes would go away, " said Andy Grove, in February 1997 in  London after the annual Davos schmooze.

"The computer industry does its stuff delivering increased performance and reducing prices because it's a competitive and open industry with hundreds of companies in it" expanded Grove, "but the telecommunications industry has a government monopoly legacy which is not used to delivering its services in a competitive economy. We need improving bandwidth and declining prices and neither trend is being served sufficiently."

"Our basic premise is that all computing is networked computing" asserted Grove. Ho

Grove saw some bright spots: "Deutsche Telekom is doing a magnificent job deploying ISDN" enthused Grove "in Germany you can get ISDN installed in a day. ISDN is a great technology. It gives Germany a major advantage."

He is also envious of Europe's ubiquitous GSM digital wireless network which he said "is still just a dream" for Americans.

So the telecoms industry can do its stuff when it wants to but it does it erratically spasmodically and on an irrationally localised basis.

"Technically there's nothing on the way to move us to higher bandwidth better than ISDN" said Grove, who included in the term ISDN all the XDSL technologies - ADSL HDSL etc.

"I'd love to believe ISDN can be deployed very rapidly but it's moving at a speed that seems very slow to the computer industry" bemoaned Grove adding "the sooner we manage to move the telecommunications industry into a more competitive world the better off we'd be in all these things."

Asked if he was promoting networked computing just because it helped sell more microprocessors Grove responded: "I get paid to serve Intel's interest but I don't get paid enough to lie. It's clearly in our enlightened business interest that consumers' eyeballs move over to the PC from the TV but we actually believe this stuff. It may only be a skip and a jump from you saying 'there's Grove giving a marketing message' but I believe the message to be true. We walk the talk as well as talk the talk."

Asked if his focus on network computing was the result of the much-hyped concept of the 'Network Computer (NC)' publicised by Larry Ellison of Oracle Grove denied that the network computer was driving a new way of using computers. Quite the reverse. "The sun doesn't rise because the rooster crows" he responded, pointing out that network computing was happening because a couple of hundred million people around the world now had computers technically capable of accessing the communications networks.

He demonstrated how consumers could use networked PC technology to cut out the retail middle-man and order manufactured goods - sometimes customised to their particular requirements - direct from the companies which made them.

However Grove warned that America was ahead of Europe in communications-based utilisation of PCs. For instance Europe has only about eight million e-mail users compared to 40 million in the US. "If your competitors are dealing in minutes while you are dealing in days you put yourself at a disadvantage" said Grove. He warned that if Europe persists in its low utilisation of its PCs it could suffer a "technology deficit which if unaddressed will lead to competitive disadvantage."