Cisco executive: It's all about technology | The Wichita Eagle

Gary Bridge has a simple analogy to justify his work in technology — more people want smartphones than toilets.

Bridge, the senior vice president and global lead for Cisco's Internet business solutions group, spoke Thursday afternoon at Wichita State University as part of the school's spring entrepreneurship forum.

Bridge talked about "the new Internet," which he called the fastest-spreading technology in the history of the world. As a result, more people want smartphones than indoor plumbing, he said, according to surveys.

He said that in seven years, starting in 1995, the Internet reached 50 percent of the American population.

"It took 100 years for the printed newspaper to reach half the American population and now it's going down," Bridge said.

The Internet is the product of the latest industrial revolution, Bridge said, one that's good through at least 2030. This growth, he said, is driven by "content that has escaped the containers."

"Like the music locked in a physical format that could be controlled and sold — records," he said. "They made it mobile, and then along came people who took the analog signals and turned it into a set of numbers.

"And when you digitize it, it escapes the container and allows it to go anywhere."

Take books, which Bridge said will disappear in the next nine years, except as ceremonial items for saving.

"This is a 580-year-old technology that had a lot to do with religion, the spread of Protestantism," he said. "And now, it goes from the writer to the publisher who does his thing onto servers and then to the data center where it costs 6 cents to download any book to your Kindle. Six cents replacing that whole other value stream."

The rapid advance in technology will affect other industries, Bridge said.

In medical care, there will be pills containing sensors that detect medication levels and deliver a report to an iPhone, a process used to treat schizophrenia patients.

"So if you don't take the pill, a nurse calls you and says, 'Hey Gary. You missed a pill. Take your pill.' This is the future of health care we can afford."

And automobiles, where manufacturer profits are shifting from product to services, like today's smartphones.

"I can imagine a day when a midrange car is free to you," he said. "You'll pay for insurance and such, but the manufacturers will make their money off the services you'll buy."

And none of it is possible without collaboration — between inventors, adopters and executors of new technological plans.

"Most failures of innovation are failures of collaboration," he said.