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What Will Be Michael Dertouzos 1. We’ve now acknowledged some fundamental ancient human forces and the ways they will affect and be affected by the Information Marketplace. And throughout the course of this book we’ve answered the questions we raised at the very beginning. So it is time to finally consider the greatest transformation that the Information Marketplace ha to offer. To get to it, let’s reconstruct the growing crescendo of key discoveries we have made, which together describe “what will be.” 2. We began with a simple but far-reaching model of the future world of information as an Information Marketplace, where people and their computers will buy, sell, and freely exchange information. Our first discovery was that this Information Marketplace can indeed be built on a technological foundation: the information infrastructure. We went on to explore the many human-machine interfaces people will use to get in and out of this new edifice, from virtual reality and fancy bodysuits to the lowly keyboard, and singled out speech interfaces as perhaps the most significant and imminent. We explored the pipes that will carry our information and the ways we will bend them to give us the speed, reliability, and security we need. We also saw how a vast array of new shared software tools will evolve on this infrastructure, shifting the attention of the entire software business from individual to interconnected computers. The arrival of this foundation is certain, but it could be delayed by a decade or more if the key players continue their wars for control and their indifference toward the shared infrastructure they all need. We saw too that there won’t be just a handful of winners that will survive these wars; the terrain is vast, rich, and full of challenges for almost every supplier and consumer of information to be a winner. 3. Our second major discovery was that the Information Marketplace will dramatically affect people and organizations on a wide scale. Besides its