[10720] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Internet vs Minitel : a futuristic view of the network evolution?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Mon Mar 7 00:08:44 1994
Date: Sun, 6 Mar 1994 19:48:20 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: com-priv@psi.com
I think the very question "who is winning / going to win Internet or
Minitel?" belies a certain mindset that is probably not useful.
Note how whenever two anythings arise in the hi-tech arena the first
thing that must be done is to debate who shall win and who shall lose.
Thus, Unix vs VMS, Unix vs DOS, Unix vs OS2, Unix vs NT, Unix vs
Novell (to permute one particularly fertile source), Mac vs DOS, C vs
ADA, this RISC vs that RISC, Cheer to Joy and Joy to All (oops,
slipped into laundry detergents there.)
Now there's no doubt that some of these "wars" resulted in a winner
and loser (NeWS vs X11, TCP vs OSI) but that's not often the result,
often instead we get a sort of peaceful coexistence with each finding
their own markets. As satisfying as such things would be at some
atavistic Jungian archetypic level (which would demand that when there
is a conflict there must be warfare and where there is warfare there
must be resolution, ie, a single winner and one or more losers,
perhaps that's more Freudian than Jungian but I think both models are
at play in the language here) such cathartic resolutions of tension
are just not that common in reality.
What I think is much more interesting is to simply look at something
as successful as Minitel and see what we can learn from it.
I suppose peppering the rhetoric with death and castration images does
make it all seem more compelling and demanding of attention.
-Barry Shein
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