Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: July 25, 2018 at 16:03:30 GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This comment comes from friend David Reed.  DLH]
>
> From: "dpreed () deepplum com" <dpreed () deepplum com>
> Subject: RE: [Dewayne-Net] Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana
> Date: July 24, 2018 at 12:31:09 PM EDT
> To: dewayne () warpspeed com
>
> My reaction (which you can share) is that he was hardly a 'thought leader', but he did have a 'schtick' that he 
> promulgated after he published his book, 'Silicon Snake Oil', which amounted to predicting the failure of the 
> Internet.
>
> In 2010, he admitted his error: "Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler 
> ... Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff ..." 
> https://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html#comment-723356 "
>
> Bob Metcalfe also is famous for predicting the same year, 1995, the complete collapse of the Internet two years 
> later. People are still saying that the "Internet is Broken" (even technical people, who don't really know how it 
> works, but think they do). He ate his hat shortly after his prediction failed.
>
> Metcalfe, whom I have known since we were graduate students at MIT, is famous for whopper mispredictions like that. 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe has some.
>
> The more embarrassing one from Metcalfe is from 1993: that wireless networking could never sustain itself. 
> (https://books.google.com/books?id=qjsEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA34&dq=x-terminal&as_pt=MAGAZINES&pg=PA48#v=onepage&q=x-terminal&f=false)
>  He said that because his intuition said that radio signalling is slow and interference is awful. Readers presumably 
> didn't question that. Neither of those are actually true - we've scaled WiFi signalling rates up to 1.3 Gb/sec or 
> more (some access points have aggregate capacity of 1.75 Gb/s today, and 802.11ax will exceed that), and we radio 
> engineers knew that at the time... And interference is easily mitigated by cooperation at the MAC layer. (I point 
> this out because since I was working at Interval Research at the time, and this "wireless future" launched my 
> personal interest in scalability of wireless networking capacity, something I've been trying to teach people about 
> since then).
>
> So why were these guys taken so seriously at the time?  Well, here's my view. They were celebrities aspiring to 
> become pundits (self-proclaimed experts). Neither of them were practicing engineers or systems architects, who had 
> better things to do - like building the "impossible" systems. As celebrities, they could appeal to the "intuitions" 
> of their audience, so they didn't have to think too hard to play to thelack of technical understanding they shared as 
> pundits with their audience.
>
> Alan Kay invented the phrase - The best way to predict the future is to invent it. So if someone predicts either 
> success or failure of a technology, ask yourself if they are inventing it. Neither one of these guys were inventing 
> anything. Metcalfe's invention was more than a decade in the past at the time. Stoll was not an inventor.
>
>
> > WHY THE WEB WON'T BE NIRVANA
> > By CLIFFORD STOLL
> > Feb 26 1995
> > <https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306>
>
>
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> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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