Silicon Valley soothsayer
By Margie Wylie
Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM

It's hard to resist calling Paul Saffo a futurist when he plays the part so well. This afternoon, he's finishing up a speakerphone conversation with a pleasant-sounding woman, which is really a computer, when our camera crew arrives.

"Wildfire," he says.

"I'm here!" it answers.

"Where do you think I am?" he asks.

"You're in your office until 4:27 p.m. and then you're unavailable," it says.

Welcome to the Institute for the Future, the nearly 30-year-old nonprofit think tank and consulting firm for which Saffo is a director. At the institute, Saffo is one of many directors whose

job it is to forecast the impact of technology on the transportation, medicine, communications, and information industries, among others. But in Silicon Valley, he's one of the most credible of a raft of gurus who earn their living talking and writing about what comes next on the information technology roller-coaster ride.

Neither wildly optimistic, like techno-utopianist Nicholas Negroponte, nor darkly pessimistic, like neo-Luddite Kirkpatrick Sale, Saffo's outlook is reassuring. He sees a scary and bumpy ride to a future that he foresees being better than the present.

His moderate stance, combined with a propensity to speak in perfect sound bytes, has earned Saffo a gold-plated card in the Rolodexes of journalists. To be certain, he's come up with his own fair share of gimmicky buzzwords like "smartefacts," but unlike many of the self-proclaimed digerati, Saffo is more than a media mannequin.

Computer and communications companies contribute to the institute's multimillion-dollar research fund in order to partake of Saffo's findings. He's recently returned from an academic sabbatical at Stanford University,

where he researched the history of technology diffusion that has him convinced the world isn't changing any faster than it ever did. Instead, more changes are happening simultaneously than ever before. In an industry and an age that considers itself unprecedented, Saffo looks through the lens of the past to try to understand the future. And he has looked through that same lens to make some pointed observations about the present as well, including comparing today's computer industry with Columbian drug cartels.

CNET NEWS.COM indulged in a wide-ranging conversation with the technology forecaster in his Menlo Park offices. We touched on Internet commerce, the fear of the future in the computer industry, and the perversity of change.

We're living in a world that changes so rapidly. How can you possibly keep up, much less forecast technological shifts?
Saffo: The secret to my business is that nothing changes. Change is so slow and it repeats itself in funny ways.

In fact, the rate of technology diffusion today when it comes to specific technologies is no different than it was 100 years ago. It takes about 30 years for any new technology to fully diffuse into our lives as an ordinary fact of life. But we all feel the acceleration effect. And the reason is not because individual technologies are diffusing more quickly, but more things are diffusing at the same time and it is the impact among multiple technologies that creates the acceleration effect we feel. The more things are developing, the more elements there are, the faster change feels.

In Silicon Valley, most ideas take 20 years to become an overnight success. All the major devices in our lives--fax machines, copiers, color TV, cable TV, personal computers--all follow a roughly similar curve where it takes about ten years before diffusion begins, ten years or longer for diffusion to really spike upwards, and then a ten-year maturity period. The Internet is a classic instance of how slow things take to catch on. It started in the late '60s. In 1989 there's this uptick, and now we're in this boost phase.

You know, most people are like Mark Twain who observed, "I'm all for progress, it's change I object to." We're all terribly afraid of change; even the people in Silicon Valley who claim to make their living with it. Their idea of change is change everything else in order to preserve the things they cherish.

Microsoft is a company that is desperately resisting change. Its strategy is two-tiered. One is to desperately hang onto what it's got: making the operating system important even though we're moving into a world where the OS becomes steadily less important. At the same time, it is desperately looking for the next high-growth field that it'll make money on. So when the OS finally does start to decline, it will find a new field. It's targeted two areas: one is media and the other is services. Everything it's doing is going into that. It is a classic case of a change-hating company; it is desperately trying to retard change.

NEXT: The middleman myth and "disinter-remediation"