A LOADED question about downloading: What offers the broadest bandwidth? A 33.6 kbps modem, an ISDN line or the car in front of your house? The answer, of course, is the car. As things stand, should you need a copy of Myst that's 10 miles away, your car can collect it 10 times faster than even ISDN can deliver.
That was the calculation, and to same extent the message, of Jens Bodenkamp, director of the chip makers Intel Europe, at the Internet World UK conference and exhibition at Olympia in London last week.
But for Bodenkamp and many other speakers it was less a question of poor mouthing the Internet, than celebrating its vast promise and excusing its extreme youth, inexperience and failure to earn anyone a decent living. So far.
The Web is increasingly central for the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Netscape, Sun, Oracle, CompuServe, and AT&T these days; and their voices were on hand to speak about their part in the Internet's future.
There were three recurring themes: the coming demise of desktop computing as we know it; the impact of "push" technology; and the need to cultivate a content rich Web if it is ever to make commercial sense, by which is meant to make a profit. (Pushers of this last theme seem to forget that half of today's traffic on the Internet is electronic mail, which for millions of people is cheaper than the post, telex, fax, or telephony. Yet they imply that the Web doesn't earn its crust!)
Even 50, no Web publisher reports making a profit. In Britain last year advertising and Web site sponsorship raised less than £2 million and 80 per cent of that, it is said, went to the Financial Times, News International, the Telegraph, Guardian and Conde Nast, a drop in the bucket of advertising revenues. The lesson, according to Ray Taylor of New Media Communication, is to create compelling content, look for multiple revenue streams, take creative risks, and cosset every single customer.
Cost is the issue in current attacks on the personal computer, though they come from an industry that has to make us buy a new thing or perish. Network computers (NCs) will, according to Philip Crawford of Oracle, slash the cost of computer owner ship - and be in the shops by Christmas.
The concept is appealingly simple: the NC is an appliance like a hairdryer or a TV set. But because it is attached by telephone line to the Internet, it is infinitely updateable.
You can leave all the complexity (applications software, backing up and so on) to the net server and, for an estimated ownership cost of US $400 a year, enjoy the "security of a mainframe and the flexibility of a PC".
This is really where "push" comes in. One relatively new, impressive vehicle, Marimba's Castanet, was being promoted last week amid a certain media flutter. Technologies such as Castanet are important, not because they can transmit and update almost unlimited quantities of content and software to users, but because they threaten to transform the Internet's gateways.
Web browsers - so far the way into this giant library - are not, people are now saying, best suited to deliver say four updates an hour to a million targeted web users. Forget about the car.