TERESA MENG, FOUNDER AND CTO, ATHEROS COMMUNICATIONS:
Q: Wireless throughput and power -- where do they eventually lead?
A: Wireless connections will be everywhere and we will use the technology without being conscious that we are doing so. We
don’t think very much about the wires that we plug in today -- in the future we’ll have even less reason to think about the
invisible wireless technology powering our daily lives. Throughput will seem almost unlimited, because the technology can
provide far more capacity than people have the need for or ability to handle. We’ll also overcome issues of power consumption
and battery life that have so significantly limited our use of wireless technology.
Q: What is the greatest threat to wireless communications and collaboration?
A: Shortsighted government intervention; in particular, the auctioning of spectrum that allows a few companies to monopolize
the air. For technology to reach its full potential, the notions of sharing and collaboration are essential. The air belongs
to everybody. An analogy is driving a car. The government’s role may be to set rules such as how fast we can drive, but it
doesn’t dictate what manufacturer’s vehicle we must use to get on the freeway. The freeway is built for everybody. As long
as we follow the rules -- and these rules have to be fair and reasonable -- then everybody can move forward.
Q: What technology issues today will become inconsequential or significantly less important in the future?
A: Two issues in particular come to mind. Increasing the clock rate in CPUs is one. The architecture of current-day microprocessors
was defined 50 years ago and doesn’t really fit with today’s silicon technology. Architectures more suitable for future-scaled
technology will be developed within the next ten years. These architectures will perform computation tasks at a much lower
power level, and they will eliminate the constant need to increase clock rate as the only resort for delivering high performance.
Another issue is software. We spend way too much time worrying about software issues such as correctness, verification, security,
bugs, and viruses. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned; we simply don’t have the right solutions yet. Revolutionary
changes in software development strategies are necessary and imminent, and we’ll no longer be held captive by these problems
in the future.
Q: Can you take a stab at labeling the technology eras of the future, out to the year 2028?
A: Today the technology world is motivated by advancements in communications. During the next 10-15 years we will figure out
how to deliver that technology in the best way. And if conditions do not impede development, within 10 years wireless technology
will dominate communications. Afterwards, the paradigm changes. In 20-25 years, communications and microprocessors will no
longer be at the heart of technology, and we’ll be entering the era of biologically inspired computation models and applications.
JEAN PAOLI, MICROSOFT XML ARCHITECT:
Q: What will XML evolve into?
A: Eventually, and soon, I believe XML will evolve into a distributed, cross-platform and widely adopted infrastructure that
is capable of discovering the resources associated with the data so it can process it in a universal way. This infrastructure
is just starting to evolve now -- developers are looking at things like how to move information around; how to find, catalog,
and reuse it in a secure manner; and how to find a program that knows how to deal with the actual piece of information.
Q: Can you take a stab at labeling the technology eras of the future, out to the year 2028?
A: Words that will be used to define the technology eras over the next five, ten, or even fifteen years will include words
like “seamless,” “wireless,” “mobile,” and “connected.” Connectivity between everything -- documents, devices, and even objects
that traditionally have not been electronic—will become more seamless in ways that will seem revolutionary compared to what
is possible now. If you look at how broadly the industry has supported XML over the last few years, it’s obvious that sharing
and integrating information from many different sources in increasingly sophisticated ways is the trend of the future. XML
is about creating documents in which the content is delimited, or set apart, by tags that explain the meaning of that content.
This means that businesses can set up company-specific or industry-specific XML schema for their documents, which will allow them to share business-critical data in a richer, more semantic way. It also means
they can integrate the information contained in different documents and databases across the organization. In the XML and
SGML community, we have been working so hard on this vision for more than 15 years and I am so excited that the vision is
getting implemented by the industry, for example with Microsoft Office 2003. Looking out over the next five years, I think
the sharing of information in this way will reach critical mass, to the point where these connected, semantic documents will
be widely adopted by businesses everywhere…
In the next 10 to 15 years -- once semantic documents have been commonplace in business and personal computing for a number
of years -- volumes and volumes of information on the Internet and company intranets will be connected. This will spawn the
development of software programs that can locate and retrieve information from many disparate sources specifically tailored
to the profile of the reader or user.
Q: What major technology issues today will become inconsequential or significantly less important in the future?
A: Because of our high demand for connectivity, some of the network problems we see today like inadequate bandwidth will be
less and less problematic in a practical sense. Already you can see the beginnings of this -- in some countries, the majority
of households are already equipped with high-speed Internet access.
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