FYI From Fiberopticsonline
Does anyone have copies of the speaches presented by Vinod Khosla & Clayton Christensen.
OFC 2000: Business and Systems Trends Supplement Optical Technology Advancements
3/8/00 BALTIMORE?Although the Conference on Optical Fiber Communication (OFC 2000, Baltimore, March 5-10) is not traditionally a venue for systems applications, much of the conference buzz revolves around optical cross-connect systems. Then again, OFC doesn't traditionally draw some 15,000 attendees by Tuesday (double the total attendance of a few years ago), with affiliations as likely to be from financial institutions as much as R&D outfits.
OFC general chair Thomas Koch of Lucent Technologies's Bell Labs marvels at the robust OFC interest, embracing both the changes and the things that remain the same. "It's turned from a science fair to a vital industry event that's nonetheless driven by science" he says. Fundamental advances in optics, semiconductors, and network architecture continue to drive the industry, he says.
"Things have never been more exciting than they are now," observes Fred Leonberger, CTO of JDS Uniphase and long-time OFC participant. He's impressed with the progress of both large companies and start-ups, which now evolve from 10-person shops to 100 employees almost overnight. OFC and the industry continue to focus on new technology?integrating multiple components with lithium niobate and return-to-zero modulation formats are on Leonberger's radar screen. But the top priority at JDS Uniphase is capacity. Manufacturing capacity, that is. The prevailing question right now is less about how to adopt new technology and more about "how do you make a lot more of what you already make," Leonberger says.
At the plenary session, technology investment guru George Gilder laid out a model of capacity abundance enabled by optical network technology, Vinod Khosla of venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers spoke of impending doom for large, traditional network equipment manufacturers by way of acquisition by start-ups, and Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School explained how large, incumbent technology companies an advantage in making incremental improvements to an installed base of technology, while start-ups have the edge in advancing disruptive technology that starts out as inferior but eventually catches on and displaces incumbent technology.
By: Erik Kreifeldt
|
