1994: the Thery report on “information highways”
The year is 1994. The world was beginning to whisper the word Internet, Al Gore was dreaming of “global communications networks” and “participatory democracy”, and American giants like Yahoo, eBay and Amazon were preparing to revolutionize our daily lives. Meanwhile, in France, the Théry Report (30 years after the publication of the Théry Report on information highways), a masterpiece of visionary analysis commissioned by Édouard Balladur, is being published. In this report, we learn with confidence that the Internet is nothing more than a “precursor to a network of highways”, a bit like a rough draft that we observe with curiosity, but without imagining for a moment that it could rival our good old Minitel.
In fact, a comparison of the figures speaks for itself: the report mentions the Internet barely 15 times, while the Minitel receives a glorious total of 66 mentions. France knows where its priorities lie. The Internet, on the other hand? Too “open”, too “cooperative” to offer serious “commercial services” and guarantee voice or image quality in real time. “The limits of the Internet demonstrate that it cannot, in the long term, constitute the world’s highway network on its own,” the report states. A global network? Ridiculous! Not with this shaky Internet, at least.
But that’s not all. The report, concerned about the “limits” of such an open network, praises the Minitel and its proprietary standard, which reached 7 million terminals. Our experts haven’t yet heard of TCP/IP or what it will change in the years to come, but who can blame them? Minitel is serious, solid and standardized. Abroad, they’re having fun with their “Web”, but here, we prefer to bet on what’s safe. And then, the experts agreed: “The Internet, a precursor to a network of highways”, no more, no less.
Finally, as the world embarks on building the digital infrastructure we know today, the Théry report reminds us that “reinventing history is easy”, but that the future looked very different at the time. Digital platforms? A mere anecdote for the experts of the time, who had no idea that telecoms would be swept away by the new digital giants.
In the end, this report is simply a reminder of a lesson we’ve learned many times before: innovation doesn’t always follow the path we set out on.
But we weren’t always so bad! Or almost.
1987: the Riboud Report
A few years earlier, in 1987, Jacques Chirac commissioned the Rapport sur les nouveaux services, emplois et qualifications, also known as the Riboud Report, to anticipate changes in the job market in the face of technological advances and industrial change. Led by Antoine Riboud, then CEO of Danone, this report offered an innovative vision, emphasizing the need for France to prepare its workers for the new challenges posed by emerging technologies.
Riboud saw that technological progress, while offering opportunities, also required a review of skills and professional practices. Thus, the report stressed the importance of ongoing training to enable employees to adapt to an environment where technologies are changing jobs and increasing the demand for new skills, particularly in the digital and service sectors. Riboud felt that without such adaptation, technology risked widening inequalities, both within businesses and in the labor market in general.
The report also called for greater flexibility in working practices, in order to integrate the new practices made possible by technology. It anticipated the upheavals linked to automation and digitalization, which were profoundly changing traditional professions. Riboud stressed that innovation should be seen not just as a technical challenge, but as a human and social challenge. Technology, he argued, had to be accompanied by a restructuring of work to maintain employee well-being and avoid excessive polarization of skills.
For a long time, this blog’s baseline was taken from this report:
“The most successful businesses are those which think in terms of technological change, work content and changes in internal social relationships”.
Some quotes from this report, and from Antoine Riboud’s vision in general, can be found in this previous article: Businesses and People : performance according to Antoine Riboud.
And if the Théry report convinced our decision-makers that nothing should be changed, it seems that the Riboud report has had the same effect, even though it advocated quite the opposite.
But should we be surprised? Both government and business seem to have a hard time listening to inconvenient truths and those who go against the status quo (50 years ago, the Marseille speech. And since then? Not much.).
In short, here we are in 2024, panicking about the consequences of a revolution we could have anticipated 40 years ago , with plenty of time to prepare.
Bottom line
An ironic and entertaining end-of-week post that serves no other purpose than to remind us that having made a precursory technological choice can prevent us from being lucid about the future, and that no matter whether the experts are right or wrong, those who read them will always do their utmost to understand what bothers them the least.
Image: anticipation by sutadimages via Shutterstock.
