When researching my new book, ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business, I was fortunate to interview more than 50 thought leaders in connectivity. Their input was invaluable, and their ideas, advice and examples provide very rich context for the Anywhere vision.
I wish we’d had room to incorporate more of our interviews in the book — but with the infinite capacity of the Web, I’m sharing some of them here.
In this excerpt from my interview with Dr. Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com and general partner of Polaris Venture Partners, we discuss the path to ubiquitous connectivity, obstacles to its growth, and how connectivity is accelerating human evolution.
Bob Metcalfe (c) Marcin Wichary
Universal, ubiquitous connectivity—yes or no?
Of course it will become universal. The only exception is the normal one.
What’s that?
Well, if you look at that famous picture of the Earth at night, you’ll see huge swaths of black—for instance, most of Africa.
That’s a pretty big exception.
Right. So it’s a question of time. Impatient people say the digital divide is a condemnation of technology—that it’s nothing short of criminal that we haven’t reached everyone yet. I say, ‘Au contraire. Don’t blame me for not getting them connectivity yet when you haven’t gotten them electricity, roads and clean water.’
You sound like you take it personally.
Sure. You can’t talk about connectivity without talking about Metcalfe’s Law, so how much more personal can it get? It’s not my fault there will be tribes that don’t get connected.
What are the biggest impediments to ubiquitous connectivity?
The complicated link between prosperity and connectivity. They are correlated, that’s clear—but which way does the causality go? I say both: it’s a virtual cycle, a feedback loop. The more prosperous you are, the more connectivity you can afford; and the more connected you are, the more prosperity you acquire. It’s a chicken-and-egg question.
But in there, the lack of prosperity is an obstacle. So they start small and spin it up. Cell phones connected to car batteries to recharge them when there’s no grid to plug into: That’s someone jumping ahead of the chicken-and-egg problem. That’s what makes it slower than you’d like.
Another obstacle is ignorance. Having a met a thousand sensible people who told me for a decade that Ethernet was doomed before it got off the ground, that I was stupid, and then having been proved right, I am now handicapped forever. When I am surrounded by sensible people, I reject everything they say (he smiles).
Another obstacle is that we need some more silver bullets. I agree that there is an inexorable trend to increase the capacity of the network. Build it and they will come—I believe that. But in order to do that, you have to make technical progress on some very basic fronts. We need more dense-wave-division multiplexing. We need terabit Ethernet. The Moore’s Law-ish trends have to keep going. That opens connectivity to ever wider groups, as it reaches down into their level of prosperity to get cheaper.
And, of course, we have the constant impediment of governments. Governments, well-meaning as they usually are, are in possession of the status quo. The standard joke is that AT&T used to be good at transmission, then it became good at billing and service, and now what it’s good at is lobbying and litigation. Governments end up making rules that slow down the spread of innovation because they’re protecting existing investments, sunk costs, revenues.
Prior to 1968, it was illegal to connect anything to the telephone network that was not made by Western Electric. The arguments got dramatic—the Bell system suggested there would be big safety issues for the consumer! So it was a big leap forward for connectivity when innovators were allowed to connect answering machines, modems, fax machines to the network, adding to the connectivity in the world.
Each wave of connectivity innovation then becomes the status quo. Its leaders switch to protecting it. I get that—they have kids who need to go to college—but they become the enemies to a new generation of innovators.
Another obstacle is lack of imagination. We all suffer from it. When I was a consultant to GE years ago, my talks got prepared with slides produced by some outside company. The bill from one slide presentation I remember was over $30,000. PowerPoint is now my life—my favorite sentence with entrepreneurs is, ‘OK, send me your deck.’ Who could have imagined that? I certainly didn’t.
That’s why I’m screwing around with Twitter now. I realize I have to watch what happens. Everyone’s favorite thing is to beat up on Twitter. It just points to the lack of imagination. I can remember when e-mail was nonexistent. ‘Why would you ever want to do that?’ people would say to me. At 3Com, we were shipping e-mail traffic an average of 40 feet, just up and down an office hallway. People couldn’t understand then why that was worthwhile. Now we don’t think twice about that, but we argue instead that Twitter is stupid.
What will be the biggest impacts on consumers? How will lives change in ways we don’t anticipate? What are people getting wrong about this expansion?
I will give you a perfect example. I look forward with great relish to the bankruptcy of the New York Times. I realize it’s not a Christian thing to do. But it’s nepotistic, narcissistic—all the ‘-istics.’ The big service that the insolvency of the Boston Globe is providing us with is that it’s going to bring down the Times. What’s the replacement? Blogs. They’re a bit limited today. But again, that’s just a failure of imagination. Blogs are evolving. The New York Times requires a huge audience to be profitable—paper, postage, printing. The future is the long tail; publications that meet the needs of a long tail are where we’re going. So the impact is the democratization of news and opinion.
But I think the biggest impact of ubiquitous connectivity is the facilitation of collective intelligence. When people talk, they are combining their intelligences. That’s why teams can be smarter than one person. The Internet has given us a much higher level of aggregate intelligence. We can vet ideas, move the ball forward.
You’re saying that connectivity is accelerating evolution.
Yes. Read Ray Kurzweil’s book ‘The Singularity is Near.’ He’s pointing to a time when devices are smarter than you or me. But the broader point is that the world is getting smarter, faster and faster.
Beyond Metcalfe’s Law, there are a bunch of other laws that attempt to quantify the network effect. David Reed did his (Reed’s Law about the ability of a network to support forming groups); there’s been a series of laws. The cover of IEEE’s Spectrum magazine a while ago had a photo of three professors who tried to debunk Metcalfe’s Law. They say it’s not only wrong, but dangerous. They say it gives rise to Internet bubbles.
Another reason to take it personally.
Well, if there’s a defect to Metcalfe’s Law, it’s that the net result [the computation of the value of the network] just goes up and up, with no acknowledgement for negative effects that are introduced that impair that value. Spam, for instance, definitely affects the value you get from the network.
There are unintended consequences, and we need to pay attention to them. But we shouldn’t allow them to stop progress. Spam, availability of porn to the wrong people are two. The people who built the Internet (and that wasn’t me) decided anonymity had to be valued. To me, it’s an exception. You must allow it, but it should not have been the rule. But they designed the Internet to make anonymity the rule, and now we’re suffering with people wreaking havoc with our systems, our kids, etc., and being able to hide. I think the ability to establish the identity of any actor is important. They found the craigslist killer through his IP address.
Of course, those who think that technology is bad would point out that craigslist enabled the killer.
Sure. All technologies are an alloy of good and bad things.
Will our computing change completely as a result of a ubiquitous network? Marc Benioff, the head of Salesforce.com, says this is a complete transformation. Microsoft says ‘No, we’re just moving to a mix of local computing and cloud-based computing.’ Which is it?
My hunch is that it’s a long-tail phenomenon. That is, big enterprises will be the last to move their apps to the cloud. Smaller companies, which can’t afford the alternative, will do it first.
Does that further democratize the small company versus the large one?
Sure, but I don’t like the word “democratize”.
You used it first.
True.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child, told me his image for how networks would evolve was the way that water lilies expand to cover most of a pond, allowing frogs to jump from pad to pad. Will it be the right analogy eventually?
He’s a god; I hang on his every word. You know the term ‘Negroponte’s Reversal,’ right? He noticed that there was a time when television was wireless and telephone was on copper cables, and we all thought long-haul telecommunications would be done via satellite. But it flipped: phone calls went wireless, TV went to cable and long-haul is optical fiber.
The water lily pad model has already been happening. Think about how enterprise networks evolved. We began with LANs (local-area networks), and then connected them with a WAN.
He’s right in his vision, but it’s not happening fast enough. He’s directionally correct.
Ironic, since he’s the guy who once said, ‘We tend to over-predict the near term and under-predict the long term.’
What advice would you have for managers about how to prepare for a new kind of consumer or new kind of enterprise as a customer or partner? How should they think differently about products, services, experiences?
A key point that you’ve made to me, which you should make very clear to your readers, whatever their conception of communication is, is that all our conceptions aren’t finished evolving. There will be a surprising and chaotic future to all this. Don’t make the mistake of taking Twitter or Facebook or blogs as they are today. One of the things complicating this revolution is that it will develop in surprising ways. When powerful forces are unleashed, it’s very hard to predict how they play out in combination.
The current dominant feature of this inexorable trend is mobility. Another one is embedded smarts, like the smart energy grid. That won’t be complete until we’re managing energy within objects that currently have microprocessors in them but are not yet networked to each other.
My standard list of the dominant features of communications right now: mobility, video and embedded connectivity. Those are the big things that are happening in communications. I have left social media off that list—I guess that’s because I’m more of a plumber.
My other observation is that that chaos, that uncertainty, doesn’t mean you give up, that you can stop planning, scheming, paying attention, experimenting. I don’t defend Twitter, I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on there. Think of it as an ongoing brainstorming session. Spreadsheets surprised me. PowerPoint surprised me. I refuse to be surprised by Twitter.
– Bob Metcalfe, April 2009
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