What do you save?
You work for Microsoft, a company whose CEO has had quite a lot of his e-mail read back to him in court. If you start bringing in everything you've ever said or seen in addition to written, aren't you setting yourself up for a really nasty subpoena?
If I have any scenario that says you wouldn't ever want to do this, or you couldn't afford to do this, it's that one. You've hit on the one point that's like that.
I guess the counterargument is that if that material ever existed in one place, the likelihood that that track would be there anyway is very high. All I'm doing is making it damn efficient for someone to go in.
Right now we have deniability. Deniability is how you treat that now. The CEO who doesn't know that what he's doing isn't right over the edge of legality. That's one of the things with phone conversations. We'll have this in e-mail but not in phone conversations. In phone conversations, it first starts out saying, I'm going to record this.
I'm still not sure I understand the value of recording all this information, or at least what value would compensate for the substantial privacy risk involved.
I have value every day in terms of being able to access something that I need to recall. I do everything electronically. At this point--this year is the first I've done it--I go out of my way to make sure that there's no paper. Our scan pile is roughly 12 inches high--that's the amount of material that's been scanned for the year, which includes cancelled checks.
Even though I can get those from the bank, I wanted more ease of access to them. The material I throw out is roughly 10 times that amount. I don't think that I need it. I throw out a lot of material--like I may invest in a company.
Those are e-documents, and in general I don't even keep those myself. I depend on the company to keep those things. Once a day, more than once a day, there's something I'm referring to. An air ticket--I make sure that all the air tickets for the family are on the machine.
I treat paper as a screen dump. That's all it is. It has no significance by itself. The only paper that has any value now are money and stock certificates. I have to keep those as originals. Anything else is in the machine, and on paper only as a screen dump.
The fact that it's there, if there's a fact that I need, I have the computer to go find it for me. How it's valuable is, all the times I would go to a filing cabinet to retrieve a piece of information, I now go to the computer instead. That gets into the storage and retrieval process. I've got the stuff in there, now how do I go find it? We haven't solved that problem to the extent that I'd like to. The system that we're building is that we take all those files, and those are all chunked in a single database, every Outlook message and contact, every document, every .jpg or .wma file, every compact disc, all in a single store so I can find it by uniform search. Should we put all the money transactions in there too? All the contacts, payees?
That brings me to my next question, which is, when do you turn this thing off?
When do you turn off the browser and say, gee, I've been visiting a lot of porn sites and I probably don't want that in there? (Laughs.) It's true, a lot of our guys are a little bit queasy now, thinking every time we open a file, that's going to be in there, too.
On the BARC Web site you write, "The technical challenge is ensuring that this information will be readable by future devices." How are you going about this?
We're not really addressing it seriously enough at this time. For now what I'm doing is putting a small number of what I hope are going to be golden standards. Right now I'm depending on HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) as being there. Also on .doc being there--(Microsoft) Word. But I feel that HTML is better because there's so much Web page material out there. TIFF is a nice format because it's such a low-level format, and one can imagine that it will always be readable. So a small number of formats. What I don't depend on is Money 2003, Intuit 2003--anything that has its weird own database that I don't think will be readable over time. So I try to reduce that down to something I expect will be readable.
Bush envisioned a contraption that resembled a desk sprouting screens. What does Microsoft's prototype look like?
Our prototype looks like a mundane old PC, but Vannevar Bush also had--what you sometimes see as a camera mounted on his head. There's one version with a camera strapped to his head that would capture what he'd seen. Our version would be a PC with links to television, telephone, the Web, a way of capturing the cameras. It's a sensing device for all the electronic media.
The Greeks had an idea of Lethe being this very desirable river because drinking from it would allow you to forget. Aren't there some virtues in forgetting some things, of letting our limited memories act as filters for some information?
I feel the opposite, which is that there are times when I think I did something or invented something and I can go back and look at it. It makes me very humble because I can go back and say there was nothing that great about it, I didn't invent that! I am finding it very humbling. This helps you deal with that reality. And I can imagine in another 10 or 15 years, I will get joy out of it. I've observed that people will sit for an hour or so mesmerized by these 8,000 photos that come up. I want to get a screensaver that deals with PowerPoint, anything with images, things that are visually pleasing. Maybe I want to remember it. I don't know--I'm thinking I'll want to remember it, not forget it.
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