Esther Dyson

Computerworld - Age: 51
Claim to fame: What Dyson thinks about technology has mattered for more than two decades. She was one of the most influential people -- and the first important woman -- in the early days of the PC industry. Equally comfortable in the worlds of technology, business and politics (though she has never voted), she stands today as a trenchant shaper of the Internet, having chaired both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
Her newsletter, "Release 1.0," which she took over from venture capitalist Ben Rosen in 1983, was a make-or-break for companies in the early days of the PC business. It continues to influence technology leaders, as does her PC Forum. Starting in 1989, she became heavily involved in developing an IT sector in Eastern Europe, and now she also runs High-Tech Forum in Europe. She has become an active venture capitalist, as well.
In her book Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (1997, hardcover, out of print); and its revision, Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (1998, paperback, available), Dyson explains how technology affects society, now and in the future.
What she's doing now: Chairman of EDventure Holdings Inc. in New York

There are times when you've seemed bored with IT. Are you bored now? No, now I'm excited again. We're getting to a really interesting point with digital identity. The reason I went to Russia in 1989 is because IT was getting boring. Software was turning into a distribution business; groupware I'd written about. Now we've created this big virtual world full of data, but it's not terribly connected to the real world, and we're trying to actually integrate the two.

What do you think is going to matter, as you look at the digital-identification world? What's interesting now is sort of the lack of ephemerality. Everything that ever happened, everything you ever said, any place you ever were is now searchable. So I think you'll have less privacy, but you'll also expect less. If you talk to kids now, they know they're leaving a slime trail everywhere.

Slime trail. Very interesting. And that'll be sort of a cultural shift, that we're all going to say OK to this? It's interesting because you can embarrass anyone. In the past, you had to be important to be embarrassable. So I think we've become somehow less sensitive to it.

Is there technology coming that will change business the way the PC or groupware did?