BOX 1.1
Constraints Imposed by Commercial Conditions

Serving every citizen implies not just technical feasibility, but also that there are products available on the market and, in particular, that many information infrastructure products take on the character of mass-market goods and services, which is not the case today for most computer-based products. If they prove relatively expensive, are virtual reality and many other of the newest technologies likely to find their way into everyday life? Economists and people in industry note that high prices are common early in technology markets; consumer advocates caution against the inherent exclusion implied by high prices.

The observed rate of progress is a function of the marketplace: vendors offer technology that sells, using their best guess about what people will buy in sufficient volumes and rushing to fill narrow market windows. Market pressures affect what kinds of interfaces are available in several ways. Rapid product life cycles, for example, militate against long-term evaluation and testing (implicitly relying on market response testing) and emphasize incremental changes that allow vendors to continue to sell what sells, in part to facilitate transfer of skills among successful products. An example is the evolution and growth in market dominance over more than a decade of graphical user interfaces that involve windows, icons, menus, and pointers. Even in a marketplace characterized by rapid change, facilitating the adoption of new technology by the existing base of users is as important to industry as assimilating uninitiated or previously unserved users. In computing, as in telephony and television, the existing base represents a known market that vendors do not want to abandon or alienate; this base provides vendors the incentive to moderate the pace of change.¹ Market pacing also reflects perceptions about what people will buy, other things being equal. Early videotext and recent cable television and on-line service market trials foundered because they failed to appeal to consumers.

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¹Controlled rate of change is reinforced by regulation in television contexts, and some speculate that the growing user base of the Internet will also prove to be a conservative force.