Every decade has its own interpretation of the future, just as it has its own interpretation of the past. As surely as we are not living in a 50s future of finned hover-vehicles and silver housework robots, we are unlikely to end up in a 90s future, where the only journeys we make are on an internet search engine and our shopping is done by personalised agents linked to the fridge.
The 90s future saw personal computers and the internet as the end-point of a revolution in manipulating information, rather than the beginning. We need to update our vision of the future to begin to see the possibilities emerging today.
We need to see computing as pervasive in the objects around us, not restricted to a special box in the corner. And to see the vast scope for connecting new kinds of things together to make powerful new kinds of networks.
Many of the technological building blocks of this future are already familiar: more powerful microchips embedded in an ever-widening range of consumer goods; always-on 3G (up to 2Mbps) and 4G (up to 156 Mbps) wireless networks; short-range Bluetooth, Home RF and HAVi networks, linking products from companies as diverse as Sony, Ericsson, Toyota and TDK. What we can only begin to imagine are the uses that will be found for them and their place in our lives.
In this future, the objects become more flexible, through their ability to draw on resources from a host of other networks. Whole new industries will spring up to service them: interactive furniture design, film channels for the flexible screens woven into clothing, intelligent electronic cash that tracks its own transactions and can't be used by ethically or ecologically unsound companies.
This will present a change as dramatic as the shift to mass production and distribution of goods during the Industrial Revolution.
Companies like Philips and Nokia understand this future, and that it is driven by people's needs and desires, not by technology. They also appreciate their dependence on broadcasters, publishers and content developers.
Britain, with its creative industries and university centres of excellence in computing and networking technologies, is well placed to take advantage of these opportunities.
However, as with Britain's first Industrial Revolution, the forces of tradition are once more throwing up barriers to the inventors and innovators. Take the mobile network operators as an example. Their networks could be a backbone for new kinds of pervasive networks, a stimulus for the industries of tomorrow. But they're not.
Imagine if, at the start of Britain's Industrial Revolution, the companies building the new roads and railways had insisted that only their own goods could be carried. Or, belatedly, that they would carry other producers' goods to market, but only if those producers gave away their products free to the road and track operators. The revolution in manufacturing would pretty soon have ground to a halt as the young workshops found themselves unable to distribute or profit from their new products.
Yet this approach has been taken by the majority of UK telcos. Instead of working with producers to distribute innovative products and services, they have deprived producers of a route to market and stifle innovation. Their lumbering bureaucracies remain fixated on voice communication, despite its imminent demise as a revenue stream as always-on networks such as GPRS come onstream. They have also displayed a startling lack of imagination and strategy about potential services, markets and revenue models.
Of course, network operators need to make a profit. But a short-termist refusal to invest in innovative products for their networks will rebound. A road or railway is only as useful as what travels down it. If there's nothing at the end, or the tolls are too high, people won't use it.
Why does the I-Mode mobile phone service have almost 15m subscribers in Japan, while Wap is struggling? It's not the technology: Wap and I-Mode are very similar. Nor is it the public: 1bn SMS messages are sent each month in Europe. The answer is simply that Japanese companies clubbed together to put a lot of extremely useful and engaging services onto I-Mode, whereas the UK phone companies have failed in the main to put any remotely interesting content on their Wap portals.
If the UK network operators invested even a tiny percentage of the £22.5 bn they paid for 3G licences in innovative applications and content for today's networks, there would be an opportunity to create a huge market extending far beyond mobile phones that would benefit everyone. If they don't, the public appetite for new kinds of networked services will be switched off before it's even started, and the telcos will have no chance at all of repaying their 3G licence debts.
The time has come for everyone - telcos, consultants, investors and the stock market - to move on from their 90s vision of the future; to stop using platitudes about unproven revenue models (what new industry ever had a proven revenue model?) as an excuse for inaction; to stop trying to compensate for coming late to the web by vying to apply"brands-not-content" business models inappropriately. And, above all, to move beyond a paralysing reluctance to back innovation for fear that the post dot.com stock market won't get it.
Otherwise, today's possibilities will be frittered away, and the world will be a poorer place for it.
