People often ask what Interval Research Corporation actually is. There are many misconceptions about it, which remind one of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. For instance, some journalists view Interval as a high-tech think tank, though people at Interval do much more than sit around in glory and "think." Some entrepreneurs see Interval as a product development center, though Interval isn't developing specific products and doesn't intend to. Still others conceive of Interval as a Xerox PARC of the 90s. Interval does descend from PARC, but differs markedly from it as well. Interval is like the elephant -- a distinctive beast -- and this introduction will give you a little better idea of who Interval people are and what they do.

Interval began with Paul Allen. If you haven't heard of Paul Allen, you probably have heard of his childhood friend, Bill Gates. When they were teenagers, they formed a short-lived data processing company. Then in 1975 Bill went off to Harvard. Months later, the first commercial personal computer debuted. Paul realized it would cause a technology revolution and talked Bill into leaving Harvard to write software full-time. They developed a BASIC programming language and founded a company named Microsoft. As you no doubt know, Microsoft has had tolerable success -- or perhaps intolerable success, depending on your point of view. Bill Gates is now the richest person in America, and Paul Allen is not that far behind. For instance, he owns the Portland Trailblazers.

Though Bill is the more acute at business, Paul is the more technical. He likes technology and cares about it. So when, after years of fabulous prosperity, he vowed to give something back to society, he turned to technology. He knew that computer and software firms were finding long-term research increasingly difficult, and that it was a crippling weakness.

So he founded Interval. The name is revealing. It is deliberately low-key, and emphasizes the fact that Interval will seem to lie quiescent for some five to ten years. The people at Interval are not chasing overnight innovation.

To head the venture, Paul chose David Liddle. David is a computer industry veteran with deep roots in research. He had been a researcher at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, and Xerox later chose him to spearhead the making of a computer based on the graphic user interface, the Xerox Star. He went on to found Metaphor Computer Systems, which built innovative workstations for data analysts. Eventually IBM bought Metaphor.

David is unusual in the sweep of his knowledge, which reaches far beyond either technology or business. He is well-read, articulate, and charismatic. He is also adept at clearly explaining complex technology -- an uncommon gift.

From their discussions emerged the first principle of Interval: the separation of church and state, or in this case, of research and company. Interval would operate completely outside any corporation. Paul and David knew that in-house research leads to subtle but corrosive handicaps. One reason is the gilded-cage phenomenon. If a company can afford its own research, it usually has no reason to exploit the findings of that research.

This idea sounds so counter-intuitive that it needs a little explanation. In general, for a U.S. corporation to conduct private research, it must have at least 50 percent market share. It's just a fact. A firm needs custody of its market two reasons: To get stockholders to bless the research, and to pay for it. Thus the major labs arise at places like AT&T, DuPont, IBM, and General Electric. RCA had a research lab when it owned 50 percent of its market, but chucked it aside when its market share fell.

So dominant firms invest in research. Yet that research often yields important innovations outside the company's realm of sovereignty. What does it do then? In fact, the firm is usually so profitable in its own domain that foraging in new territory makes no financial sense. It can spend the money to greater effect in its own business area. If you're getting 15 percent pre-tax in your current field, why go running after 5 percent in a field you don't control? So the firm stays where it is, like a cat on the warm hood of car.

There is a second pitfall to in-house research: Mismatch of technology model and business model. A firm can develop a wonderful invention that simply does not fit its business competence. Its sales force may know nothing about it, and its typical clients may not need it. Pursuing the innovation can force upheaval and turbulence on a comfortable company, which may simply decline the effort. At Interval, our results will almost certainly be unpredictable. It therefore makes no sense to form a business plan now. Interval will worry about a business plan when it has some idea of what the business might be. Both the gilded cage and the mismatch of models played a role at Xerox PARC. Xerox invented the graphic user interface for computers -- at a time when it dominated copiers. It didn't need to compete elsewhere and wasn't oriented to the personal computer market. But Apple seized hungrily on the technology, which it needed for its very survival.

The Xerox PARC of the 1970s is both a positive and negative model for Interval. We have learned from its triumphs as well as its failures. They give Interval its touchstones, the credos we follow today. There are a handful of them.

One is: "Invent the future you predict."

In other words, Interval is playing both Edgar Cayce and Edison, and hoping for the success rate of only one of them. The slogan describes a two-step process. First, people at Interval forecast the future. They make assumptions about the year 2000. What will the information environment look like? What technologies will become cheap, ubiquitous, and commonplace? What problems and opportunities will loom up?

Next, Interval researchers tackle these issues. They seek to define the concerns, map out the concepts, create the technology that will be important in this future, even if no one can use it today. At Xerox PARC, for instance, the researchers assumed chips and memory would become very cheap. These givens led to novel ways of thinking about computers, and ultimately to the machines that now prevail on desktops. In the same way, Interval researchers hope to smooth the path to the future we envision. In a down-to-earth way, they'll try to fulfill their prophecies.

The second precept is: "Substitute money for time."

Money can pull the future into the present. Instead of waiting years for inexpensive technology, you can get it today if you pay a little more. For instance, the prototype workstations built at Xerox PARC cost $15,000 just to assemble, and would have sold for $40- to $50,000 on the market. They were expensive. But that money telescoped eight or ten years into a few months. It gave researchers a big jump on the future.

The third guideline is: "Use what you build, build what you use."

This is a basic, common-sense idea: Put every researcher in the position of an end-user. For instance, as engineers at MIT were building the Multix system, they used it for all their everyday chores. They didn't treat it as an ongoing art project or a silicon lab rat, but as an essential tool. So if it crashed, there was an uproar until the person responsible fixed it. What do you think the result was? It got fixed very quickly. And in the longer term, everyone worked with much greater care, sharpness, and urgency. Daily use is not just instructive, but motivational. If you have to ride in the canoe you build, you make very sure it's watertight.

This principle may seem simple and even obvious, yet most research labs in this country still haven't grasped it.

The fourth core idea is: "Tap the community wisdom."

At Interval, each researcher knows more or less what everyone else is doing. There is constant communication back and forth. As a result, impressing peers becomes more important. This kind of approach differs radically from one of simply satisfying the boss. It exploits into a wider and keener source of feedback, and gives projects a finer edge and an extra gloss.

Moreover, it's also true that in research, people who do nothing but manage really can't judge the caliber of ongoing work. So you want to flatten the pyramid, to have managers as peers and peers as managers. Administrators must be in the thick of doing the science. That's one reason David continues to carry out his own research, so, as he says, he is "entitled to have an opinion." This need for administrative immersion is peculiar to research. In development, the best course is just the opposite. There, managers need distance. They should make the gross decisions, such as whether a project is on schedule or shows promise, without worrying about the fine-grain technical detail.

The final principle is: "Research must have a return."

Interval is not a foundation. In fact, you can think of it as a long-term startup, since Interval is significantly stretching the normal startup timetable. A typical startup should yield concrete results or ship product in two years, and should verge on self-sufficiency by three. Interval is tripling those numbers. Interval expects expect to offer up product in five or six years after its founding and to support itself in ten. It has a fixed budget, and if Interval can't shoulder the rent after ten years, the people at Interval will all just shake hands and move on.

Of course, a decade is a breathtaking expanse to most researchers, who must normally content themselves with six-month driblets from venture capitalists. Nonetheless, this limit adds deadline adrenalin to the work. It will prevent dawdling.

As they were setting basic principles, Paul and David were also scouting out researchers. They wanted talent, of course, but other qualities as well. For instance, they sought a certain discreet distance from entrepreneurial activity. They didn't want individuals caught up in the fever of entrepreneurship, which they felt would distract from research. They also didn't want researchers hostile to enterprise, since Interval is ultimately a seedbed of commerce. Indifference to entrepreneurship was fine, antipathy wasn't. They sought the middle ground, between the extremes of avid participation and overt malice.

They also wanted a large gene pool, a diversity of talents and outlooks to give hybrid vigor. Hence, they built an organization with experts in not just computer science and engineering, but also product design, writing, cinema, linguistics, and entertainment.

Why does Interval have such diversity? The answer lies in assumptions about the future of information technology. It will embrace a wider variety of media, and Interval will need the insights from many different fields to handle it.

In fact, a bewildering array of information services will spring up, in media of all sorts. These services will be very different from anything offered today. For instance, a company might offer thousands of videos in compressed form online, so you could dial in, tap the one you want, and play it once.

This data wilderness will be hard to navigate. Indeed, in many ways it's become a jungle already. People with satellite systems now have access to hundreds of channels. How will ordinary viewers ever find their way around 500 channels? An army of choices will march in at each time slot, and TV Guide will approach the bulk of PC World.

And that's just television. When really powerful computers arrive in the next few years, it will get much worse across the board. Information services will proliferate in all media. How will we handle this plethora? As in a physical wilderness, we will need guides, high-tech Siskel and Eberts to rate the data services, to nudge us one way or another. This challenge is immense, and will spark many new entrepreneurial opportunities.

Video and audio will come to permeate the information brew. In business terms, this means entertainment will drive the technology. Video and audio are especially suited for entertainment, and computers will become super-multiplexes.

At the same time, the networks we now use will expand into a total communications ether, surrounding us on every side. Whatever special aura digital communications now possess will utterly disappear, and we will take it for granted. We will have universal access. Marshall McLuhan talked about a global village. We're talking about a global conference room.

And finally, computing will be almost ubiquitous. Most computers won't sit on desktops. They will be portable and even wearable. Computers will also merge with the environment. For instance, you could have a smart wall. As you neared it, it would recognize you, figure out why you are approaching, and anticipate your needs.

Interval is investigating a variety of projects based on this vision of the future. For one thing, Interval is probing design. Studio design helps light the way in many industries, but it is rare in information technology. Too often companies analyze a problem in magnificent isolation -- how do I make a Good Spreadsheet? -- rather than in human context -- how does one make a spreadsheet that will really satisfy people? Interval will try to fill this gap, studying how to start with user needs and move from there to determining the software and hardware.

Interval is also interested in location-free computing. We're examining ways of liberating people from their station at the desktop, to bring computing throughout the office and beyond.

New user models are needed. The novelty of the graphic interface has long since worn off, and almost nothing else has emerged to replace it. In fact, the technology has simply gone from baroque to the rococo, spiraling in on small details of interface rather than trying to extend it further. Interval is interested in expoiting skills beyond eye-hand coordination and other channels of human communication, especially considering models that aren't based on physical metaphors, since they may not fit the tasks people face.

Interval is also probing cellular networking, a technology that its pioneers can truly botch, especially if they ignore its dynamics. It's important to think about this now, before clumsiness becomes embedded in the technology.

In the long haul, how would Interval researchers like people to look back on Interval? What do they want to accomplish?

Interval will spin off new ideas to drive industry. Interval researchers don't know what industry, and in fact many of their ideas will probably not apply to any existing industries. So, if things go well, they'll likely be starting new ones.

Interval would also like to create opportunities for entrepreneurs. This goal goes hand in hand with the previous one, for as companies like Microsoft have shown, new industries generate some of the prime opportunities for entrepreneurs.

And Interval wants to be a model for new research communities, pioneering research methods that other companies can adopt. If Interval succeeds here, it could have an impact on the blueprint of innovation, a genetic impact that reaches many fields and persists long after Interval may have gone.

Follow this link to find out more about Interval Research Corporation.

Y2K Post-Interval note:

Interval Research closed its doors abruptly on Good Friday, May 2000. The link above now goes to a group that retained a few people from Interval, as well as the corporate name and web url, and markets a videophone product.