Paul Saffo is a director at the Institute for the Future, a 28-year-old management consulting foundation that provides long-range planning and forecasting services to Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. A specialist in the long-term social and commercial impacts of new information technologies, Saffo's clients include major computer, telecommunications and media companies. He has published numerous articles in a number of periodicals. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University and Stanford Law School.
Educom Review: You're usually referred to as a "futurist." Is that how you categorize yourself?
Paul Saffo: No, I prefer to call myself a forecaster. "Futurist" is a term with a very unhappy history from the first part of the century, when it identified a sort of neo-Fascist, Italian movement. More recently, it is a term that's more preoccupied with outcomes than processes, and people who describe themselves as futurists generally describe what the world will be like, not how we will get there. And what that flirts with is, in my business, the cardinal sin, which is prediction, because prediction isn't just hard, it's logically impossible. The truth is that at any given moment in time there is an array of possible outcomes - possible futures, if you will - and the whole point in forecasting is to understand the size of that array of outcomes.
ER: You did undergraduate work at Harvard and then have law degrees both from Cambridge University and from Stanford. One doesn't expect a lawyer to get into the forecasting business.
Saffo: My undergraduate work was a funny mix of anthropology and computer science and the history of science, and so the issues that preoccupied me as an undergraduate are the things that preoccupy me now, such as: what is the relationship between technology and culture? And the legal experience was serendipitous in that it was also my first lesson in forecasting, where I got the macro right and the micro wrong. I figured law was an appropriate place to be because that's where the rubber met the road in terms of the intersection of technology and society. Macro, that's correct; micro, it's wrong because being a lawyer means being a lawyer and doing a lot of boring things that only lawyers do - even though legal policy issues are absolutely fascinating. I always skew toward the policy side of things, which is why I was editor-in-chief of the International Law Review.
ER: As a forecaster, what are the biggest surprises you've seen in terms of technology and culture?
Saffo: Well, you have to use "surprises" qualifiedly, because oftentimes, at a general level, something is completely expected but at a detail level it's completely unexpected. The World Wide Web is a real interesting surprise. In general, it came about right when one would have expected the Internet to take off on a diffusion curve if it were going to take off at all, because the Internet had been around for about 20 years and it generally takes about 20 years for new ideas to gain acceptance to the point where you get rapid adoption. And the notion of hypertext was more than 20 years old at that point. The phrase was first coined in the early 1960s and first imagined in its modern form in the 1940s by Vannevar Bush. The surprise was that the two of them would collide together in the form of the World Wide Web.
Just to give you an idea of what a surprise that was, put yourself back in, say, 1986 and '87. CD-ROM is almost 10 years old and everybody then expected CD-ROMs to really take off big time. Hypertext as a term finally had leaked out of the labs and was coming into public consciousness. And the pundits of the time were all saying we are going to have a hypertext hyperfuture, and by hyperfuture they imagined a world where you would buy interactive CD-ROMs with hypertext on them.
ER: With the benefit of hindsight, what should the pundits have been told?
Saffo: They should have been told: "Well, you've got the hyperfuture right but, you see, it is not going to happen that way. CD-ROMs are going to be a niche market and very few of them will have real hypertext. But instead there's going to be this huge, global hypertext system that will be so inexpensive and ubiquitous that 10-year-olds will routinely sit at their computers and connect to network hypertext computers in Japan and download cartoons. And then their parents will get online in the evening to buy things. What they are going to buy is not electronic information but paper books from earth's biggest bookstore, Amazon.com." It's a case where the reality is a perfect inversion of the forecast. That forecast about a networked world seemed wildly outlandish, much more outlandish than the forecast about CD-ROMs or hypertext. And yet the CD-ROMs remain a curiosity and the World Wide Web is a reality. And that's a kind of surprise that is absolutely normal in the forecasting business. Really, the art of forecasting is knowing at what level of granularity the curtain of good information falls, and be sure to be clear in your forecast which parts are uncertain. We think of forecasting as the art of finding certainty, but it really is not. It's really the art of acknowledging uncertainty.
ER: Let's think about the personal computer. Any surprises in the last 15 years? What would you expect in the next 15?
Saffo: Well, what we call the personal computer has been a moving target. The personal computer as it is used today is profoundly different from the personal computer in use 10 years ago. Ten years ago it was a standalone device defined by what it processed for us. End applications were the end-all and be-all of computing. Today the box outwardly resembles the box back then but, in contrast, it is defined not by what it processes for us but by what it connects us to. And the things to which it is connected are what define it, not the applications. Nobody asks anymore, "Gee, what operating system do you have?" or "What word processor do you use?" We say, "What are the cool sites where you hang out?" So the personal computer itself is a moving target.
I think the biggest surprise is how persistent, despite all this change, the traditional vision of personal computing has been. And I actually think that is due to a commercial distortion-the sustained extraordinary success of Microsoft. Most people fundamentally do not understand what Bill Gates or Microsoft are about. Microsoft is not a technology company. Bill Gates is not a technologist. Bill Gates is probably one of the top three businessmen of this century, but he is not a technologist. And his biggest weakness, but also his strength, is that he lacks a fundamental technological aesthetic. He is technologically agnostic and very happy to chase after whatever looks like it will be a commercial success. And, as a consequence, the very success of Windows and Microsoft has retarded change and innovation in the personal computer arena.
ER: How do you come down on the network computer issue?
Saffo: Well, described generally, the network computer is definitely in the groove of the trajectory to come. In terms of the specifics I think all of the network computer visions, be they Oracle's or Microsoft's, are flawed to some degree or other.
ER: Why?
Saffo: Well, the problem comes mainly from the motivations of the companies doing these things. You know, Microsoft is motivated by holding onto market share, and Sun and Oracle are motivated by beating Bill Gates. And everybody is so busy worrying about the commercial dynamics that the user and the user's needs and interests have really gotten lost in the shuffle. And thinking about how to beat your competition is not necessarily the way to create something that consumers are really going to want.
ER: But if you just wiped that aside, what aesthetic would you come down on? Would you think of the notion of a network computer as one that makes sense?
Saffo: Well, yes, in a general sense. What we are really headed toward is a world defined by a computational ecology, where you have a diversity of different kinds of devices with differing degrees of access orientation. And having a device at the desktop that is really built from the ground up with access in mind is the right design decision. We will have other devices that are at the desktop that are designed for other purposes, but we will have access-oriented devices.
ER: But getting away from the desktop, how will the digital world progress? Will computing and television converge, for example? Is that still going to happen?
Saffo: No. I'm not a believer in digital convergence at the market level. Unquestionably, there is digital convergence at a device level. You know, smash your TV; count the parts. Smash your PC; count the parts. And every year the parts count looks increasingly similar between the two. But balancing against a convergence at the technical level is a tendency toward the opposite in the markets and the applications level, which is a digital divergence. This is about creating new industries atop the digital order. It isn't about compressing all of our gizmos into one super device in our house or having one super industry.
Another case in point is Web TV. What we are doing at a general level is adding TV-like qualities to our desktop-i.e., video and multimedia. And we are adding PC-like qualities to our TV-tops-i.e., interactivity and two-way access. But, you know, this colleague of mine, Tom Morgan, likes to say there are two kinds of screens in our lives. One we sit three feet away from and watch leaning forward; that's called a PC. Another, we sit six feet away from and watch it leaning backward; that's called a TV. Well, those two venues remain in our lives, and the devices for each venue will become more distinct from each other. So, back to Web TV-what makes Web TV interesting is the moment you put Internet-based interactivity into that six-foot screen you set yourself up to create entirely new kinds of media that have never existed before. The user experience in front of that TV is very different from sitting at a desktop. It's an experience that invites group participation. It's an experience that invites different kinds of interaction besides mice, and I think in the end it is going to be an inspiration to create new kinds of interactive media that we've never seen before.
ER: What about content? The Web now has taken on a lot of new life because of its role in distributing news. What do you see the Web doing ?
Saffo: Well, I think it's an explosion-not just in content, but an explosion in media forms. It's not, for example, the same old news. In fact, the least interesting part of the Web is things like MSNBC, which eventually they are going to pull the plug on.
The most interesting part has been newer things. You know, whatever you may think of the Drudge Report, Matt Drudge is exploring a new media form. And, by the way, it's an interesting media form because, as outrageous as we all find it, it is really very different. Everything is his bailiwick. He doesn't care if it's a rumor about Washington or Hollywood. It has much less of a geographical or subject matter orientation than TV or radio does, and the scale of his operation is profoundly different. This is one guy and a partner with a borrowed computer. And, of course, it offends our traditional media sensibilities. I am as offended by it as anyone else. But, you know, we always forget that young media go through all sorts of intermediate stages. Barely 100 years ago, it was the age of yellow journalism, where newspapers competed with each other to see who could be the more outrageous, and senior executives of the newspaper industry, in the very staid newspaper industry today, forget that their predecessors were as wild and reckless as Drudge is today.
ER: How would you see the impact of these new media forms affecting the old media forms over 10 or 15 years; for example, do you see traditional newspapers changing drastically or dying off? The book industry? The magazine industry?
Saffo: Well, I think what really happens when a new media form comes in, it comes in by doing something that the old media form did very badly or not at all. So these things come in and in the long run end up displacing old media forms. And the old media reinvents itself into something new or, very rarely, it actually evaporates.
From the recent past, a case-in-point is that of movies and radio and the shift from movies and radio to TV. Movies in this country were a weekly habit in the '40s and up until the advent of TV. If you went to only one movie a week you weren't a particularly serious moviegoer. Serious moviegoers went to three, four movies a week. And Hollywood was exquisitely tuned to feeding that habit. It turned out large numbers of comparatively inexpensive movies. Along came TV and TV did two things. It displaced radio as the electronic heart in our homes, and it also broke the movie habit. TV became the habit and we went to movies less frequently. Movies did not disappear but the industry went through a wrenching shift as it adjusted itself from movies as habit to movies as less frequent experiences, increasingly the centerpiece of an evening out. And the whole industry changed.
ER: In what way?
Saffo: They had to produce fewer films, that cost more per film and headed us toward blockbusters. And what happened to radio is even more interesting. Radio literally got kicked out of the house by the TV but this happened at the same time they were building the interstate highway system. Suddenly people were in their cars more and radio reinvented itself as audio wallpaper in our automobiles. So that the new technology comes in and it shoves other technologies to the side to reinvent themselves.
ER: And what about print media?
Saffo: In the case of print media, without a doubt there are troubling signs that fewer people are reading than in the past. But leaving that aside, take a close look at something like Amazon. Amazon.com works because it has found a more efficient channel to sell books to readers than traditional bookstores have been able to accomplish. And so, as a reader, unless you live in a major city close to a major bookstore, you come to rely on Amazon for its ready access to a vastly larger number of books and information about a vastly larger number of books than you've ever had before. And that means for people who read, they will buy more books than ever before. That's phase one.
I think phase two of things like Amazon is going to lead to new print-based media forms. It's a very efficient distribution channel and once we have the technologies of selective binding and selective printing, I think you're going to discover a situation where it's going to become economic for someone to seriously contemplate doing a print run of, say, 200 copies of a book or less. And, you know, the modern novel is a product of technology. Paperback books really are the children of new kinds of printing technology and binding technology that started between the wars. Now I think we may see new kinds of print-based media that come out of a combination of digital technology for links to customers, efficient distribution in the form of Federal Express and other delivery services and efficient kinds of printing and binding.
ER: Let's talk in general terms about the art of forecasting. How do you go about your work?
Saffo: There's no formula. The nature of my business really comes down to one thing and that's peripheral vision. If you are looking at a domain, you make your best estimate of a forecast with the information you have. And then you set out systematically to prove yourself wrong. My personal motto is: "Strong opinions weakly held." That sounds a little flip, but if you think about it for a moment, you never have 100 percent information, and the best way to come out with a forecast is with rapid and successive approximations of the end point. And it's sort of the opposite of what we all tend to do; typically we take forever to come to an opinion and then we stubbornly hold on to our opinion in the face of other evidence that we cast out - it doesn't meet our opinion. The discipline in my business is to come to a conclusion, the best conclusion possible, but then to really look for information that proves the conclusion wrong.
ER: And how do you think about time tables when you look ahead?
Saffo: Well, time is central to any forecaster. When someone says, "What do you think will happen with [fill in the blank]?" my first question is "What's your time frame?" How soon? Most of my forecast work is 10 years out, three to 10 years out. Occasionally it is possible, depending on how the question is framed and where we are in the cycle, to look as far as 50 years out, perhaps beyond. The farther out you look, the more uncertain things become. There's really no mystery to what I do. Even though we have a series of methodologies we use at the Institute for the Future, at its heart what we really do is systematically applied common sense.
ER: As you look ahead 10 years or so, do you see any forgotten technologies that are likely to re-emerge?
Saffo: Well, you know, all sorts of technologies are always reinventing themselves. Yesterday's misfit can be tomorrow's critical technology. The classic instance is the digital technology itself. You know, George Boole in the last century described what we now call Boolean algebra, which struck everybody as a completely useless mind exercise, and yet Boolean algebra is absolutely central to digital calculation and technology. So there are always things lying around that get swept up in change and prove to be central.
In terms of analog, it just happens we are at a moment where there is a host of technologies coming in that are going to have a very large short-term impact on the information revolution. And the most important of these is MEMS - microelectric mechanical systems. This is the first wave of a series of waves that will allow us to create sensors that allow our devices, our computers and our networks to become aware of the physical world around them. And that's going to have a big short-term effect in the next decade or two in terms of allowing computers to become vastly more central to our lives than they are today. I mean, for people to say today that computers are taking over, while it may seem true, it's also very quaint. It's like someone in 1965 saying, "Omigosh computers are taking over; now they are doing payroll!"
The centrality of computers in our lives today is nothing compared to what it will be a decade or two from now. But that's also the leading edge of a larger trend that will occur over the next 50 years because the essence of sensor technology is to some degree based on analog electronics and not digital. And it's the leading edge of a growing analog electronics industry. I think that in 50 years the percentage of electronics that is analog will be much larger than the percentage of electronics that is purely digital and that the industry will be a hybrid analog-digital technology.
ER: A final question. Do you have any thoughts about whether students in colleges and universities are prepared to think about the future and to do the kind of thing you do, to have peripheral vision?
Saffo: Well, I hope they are. I certainly would not advise anyone to become a forecaster by profession. I think it is much more important for everybody to adopt a forecasting perspective in everything we do. There's a slightly different issue that troubles me right now with universities, and that is the growing perception in industry that-particularly in high-tech-universities are not delivering people with the skills that these industries want. And leave aside whether they are right or not - because I'm not completely convinced I can answer that question - the fact is that perception is reality, particularly when the perception is held by people who command very large sums of money and whole industries.
So you have people like Scott McNealy talking about the General Motors Institute being his idea of the ideal institution and Bill Gates getting very interested in education, and the like. My fear is that this lack of understanding between the culture of universities and the culture of high-tech business is going to lead to some well-intentioned but possibly very destructive initiatives by corporations and wealthy entrepreneurs to set up new kinds of institutes that are going to try and train more engineers and technologists. I do think we have a problem in that there are not enough people learning math and the sciences today, but also at the same time, the people who are trained in engineering and technology do not learn enough humanities either. And so I can see it as being a terribly disruptive period, particularly in the area where government spending in academics is not likely to increase, that suddenly well-intentioned philanthropic efforts by entrepreneurs and the heads of industries could end up going in directions that starve traditional universities.