"Big Bandwidth Blues Digital Island's 58-point leap makes me a moron." ....not me , it's the writer of the article---->
upside.com
Back when tech's warrior kings first bellowed the bandwidth rallying cry, Digital Island popped up on the war field. A tiny company located in Hawaii, Digital Island promised a non-clogged separate Internet-type network. It would move data to and from big sites through its traffic-free hubs, located conveniently between the United States and Asia, for a fee.
Your traffic headed to Europe? Let's bypass Mae West and Mae East, and head straight there. Simple concept. A no-brainer.
But three years ago, in the three-years-ago mindset, there wasn't much new to the concept. All big companies had proprietary networks at the time. Your big-six type corporations built their superfast data and phone networks, maintaining open lines just for them. Financial entities hooked themselves up to data central through proprietary networks.
Where Digital Island said "bandwidth," I saw "systems integrator." Shrug.
But it wasn't companies exclusively that would send data over the network. The medium-growth business I pictured didn't happen. Instead, Web sites sent their products, their content over the Digital Island network. New media plus subscriber growth plus bigger content loads to push equals duh on me.
Wednesday, Sun and Inktomi put their weight behind Digital Island, creating a three-way partnership for beefing up Internet delivery times. Inktomi brings its caching expertise, Sun chips in the servers and Digital Island moves the bits.
Wall Street tacked on the 58 points itself, free of charge. Gratuities are appreciated.
Which brings us to the moral of this story. Like Eurydice, when marching up the steep, bleak incline out of economic hell, don't look back. Hold on to Orpheus' hand when he plays a sweet song of unending growth, bandwidth deficits, connected devices yearning for a pipeline and Wall Street favor.
Corporation's insatiable desire for e-commerce and a stake in the Internet world fueled Digital Island's upside. They will do the same for streaming media, broadband deployment, 24x7 connections in the home and all the other concepts that were harder to accept a year and a half ago, but are chugging up the growth hockey-stick today.
Take hold of that security blanket. Suck your thumb if you must. But embrace the furious pace of change. Don't even blink when those research firms drag out dollar-estimates in the billions, user-numbers that seem mighty outlandish as you sit at your desk and watch your connection choke, or the choppy narrowband content scrape by.
The time has come for the big-bandwidth ideas. There's no stopping it.
:-)))
'cause it's going ...
2MAR$ |
