Ten years ago, CD-ROM was the dominant medium for electronic publishing, but things have changed. The new model combines online and off-line publishing to provide the best of both worlds: the "fat," high- volume, relatively static information on CD-ROM, and the "thin," low-volume, relatively current data online. Putting the Web on CD-ROM can be the best way to deliver an organization's home pages to the public.
Government Keynote
Dr. Michael Nelson, of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, explained the goal of the Global Information Infrastructure: to give all users the information they need, when they need it. He predicts that providing more data to more people in more places less expensively will change everything, not by five percent, but by an order of magnitude or more.
The government plays a role in six areas: Vision, R&D, Applications, Telecommunications Policy, Information Policy and International Policy. Of these, telecommunications policy has received the most attention lately. The administration's policy in this area can be summarized by the bumper sticker: Any company, any service, to any customer. While the telecommunications industry has the same type of technology as the computer industry, Nelson noted, it has almost no innovation. With deregulation, expect 90% cost reductions and a much richer variety of choices.
State of the Industry Update
TFPL Multimedia, a company that tracks the CD-ROM and multimedia industries, reported that the installed base of CD-ROM drives is now 60 million worldwide. It has doubled every year since 1992. 95% of the PCs shipped now have CD-ROM as standard equipment. Based on the numbers of PCs shipped, the forecast is over half a billion drives installed by the year 2000.
The vital point here is CD-ROM versus Internet. PCs are being shipped with CD-ROM drives, not with modems. Sixty percent of the drives being shipped currently are 4X. A 4X CD-ROM drive has a data transfer rate of 600 kbps compared to the fastest modems which sometimes transfer data at 28.8 kbps. So a 4X CD- ROM delivers data at least 20 times faster than a 28.8 modem. Gateway is providing 8X drives in all their systems; they run 40 times faster.
The TFPL database contains 14,000 titles from over 2,000 publishers. At the E3 Trade Show alone, 1,700 new titles will be released or announced. These numbers suggest that CD-ROM is not only not "dead," as some have suggested, it is growing faster than the Internet.
Industry Keynote
Philippe Kahn addressed the conference via Intel's Proshare 2.0 videoconferencing product connected over an ISDN line from San Jose, California.
Kahn said the Internet is a low bandwidth medium. As a result, there will be a tremendous complementarity between the Internet and CD-ROM. The Internet connects everything to everything, but optical storage will carry the multimedia and video.
Consequently, online and off-line will blur. As you use an online service, the base graphics will come from a CD-ROM. That is a perfect example of the marriage of the online and off-line worlds.
Looking at the markets, in the enterprise, CD-ROM readers are not on every desktop. People may what them, but the company resists this. Instead, we see shared banks of CD-ROM drives on the network. Thus, CD- ROM and CD-Recordable have a role to play on intranets as well as on the Internet.
SIGCAT '96 - May 19-23
These opening keynote addresses were only part of a conference and exposition featuring the latest in CD- ROM products and technologies along with related Internet technologies. A Webcast reporting on the various sessions (including digital photographs) was posted and linked to the SIGCAT Web site. A virtual conference disc—a CD-ROM with transcripts and audio recordings of the conference sessions—is also under development, so even if you did not attend, you can still benefit from SIGCAT '96.