25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Lord Mitchell Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mitchell (Lab)]

My Lords, in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, for her magnificent speech, I must say that she and I belong to a very exclusive club in your Lordships’ House: we are both IT entrepreneurs, although there are a few others. I pay every tribute to all she has done. For the help she has given in the skills sector through Go ON and for the help she has given me in my role in Labour Digital, I thank her again.

In 1967 at the age of 24, I joined what was then called the data processing industry. I was a systems engineer, and the first central processor I ever worked on was an IBM 360/30. It had 64,000 bits of memory and it cost £65,000 to buy. The CPU was a huge box with dials and lights on it. It was kept in a dedicated air-conditioned environment and it must have weighed a ton. Input was via punched cards. Today, I have an iPhone 5 in my pocket, which has a million times more memory and costs one-thousandth of the price. It has no air conditioning, no punched cards and input is via touch or voice. This is Moore’s law in action, with processing speeds doubling every 18 months.

The world wide web needed not only massive leaps in computing speed but also massive leaps in communication ability. We all remember fax machines that connected at 9,600 bits per second—how fast they seemed then. My network at home has a speed of 100 megabytes per second—10,000 times as fast. We are witnesses to a revolution in digital that is every bit as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution was 200 years ago. Just as James Watt showed that steam could drive a machine and replace muscle, so Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the world wide web has replaced the way we access data, communicate and organise our lives. As coal, oil, petrol and electricity give us energy to power our lives, so digital is now giving us mass access to swathes of information.

I would like to take a look at retail. In the UK, more than 3 million people work in this sector. If you compare the number of employees required for each £1,000 sold online against the numbers required for traditional retailing, the ratio is 1:3, so any move to online retailing is bound to cause significant reductions in employment. Last year, Jessops, HMV and Blockbuster all went bust due to their own technology myopia. There are many more to come. In the past week we have seen that, over the holidays, the quantity of retail sales completed online reached 20%—a massive increase. The retailers who are succeeding are those who embraced online many years ago. However, Morrisons was never interested in online retailing, and we have seen what is happening to that company.

I have cited retail, but I could have mentioned schools, universities, medicine or even government itself. All these sectors are changing at a very rapid pace. As other noble Lords have mentioned, the next big thing will be wearable technology. What we see before us is Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction” on steroids. The digital revolution is sweeping all before it. Those who embrace it will prosper, and I suspect that those who do not will mostly perish.