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Measuring and Sustaining the New Economy Report of a Workshop (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Panel II: Drivers of the New Economy
Pages 60-61

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From page 60...
... Sloan Foundation Ralph Gomory opened the panel by emphasizing the difficulty of prediction. Substantial bodies of experts, he reminded the group, "have at best a mixed record of predicting what matters." He raised the examples of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Internet, great events that were "invisible in prospect and dominant if you look backward." Such examples, "should give us some feeling of modesty about what is being attempted today." The Difficulty of Predicting New Hardware Noting that prediction is not uniformly bad, Dr.
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From page 61...
... He had heard those sentiments as long ago as the 1960s, when IBM launched the little remembered Future Systems project, or FS. IBM labored for three years because it had come to the same conclusion: that hardware costs would drop and the only route to continued profits would be to generate software more cheaply.
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Key Terms

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  • technical prediction
  • cumulative effect
  • believed electronic
  • electronic devices

  • ibm launched
  • accumulated water
  • faucet wider
  • mechanical devices
  • seldom perfectly

  • continued profits
  • packaged software
  • function effectively
  • data storage
  • credible projection

  • stumbling block
  • common protocol
  • generate software
  • stunning example
  • soon replace

  • storage revolution
  • enormous impact
  • hardware costs
  • recent conversation
  • little remembered

  • suddenly manifest
  • replace disk
  • software innovations
  • perfectly flat
  • remembered future


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