Wintel's Demise Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Wintel's Demise

MSFT 514.77

-0.4%

Nov 4 3:59 PM EST

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To: Bill Jackson who wrote (118)	9/12/1997 9:44:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	of 328

Right on, Mr. Jackson. Every computer resource ever invented obeys Parkinson's law like it was on growth hormone. Network capacity is no exception. What else is it that has been the great killer of client/server success, but building an application which looked great with a handful of users, but wouldn't scale over 30 because of the network bandwidth. And we are talking LAN here folks, LAN that is already as fast or faster than the technologies like cable modem. Realize that dream of universal cable modem distribution and you'll just have people downloading movies and books and what have you. Then they will turn around and forward the movie to 10 of their friends saying, "have you seen this?" (one of which will scream because they are receiving it at 28.8!). What does this mean? When I go to download something large, but of perceived value, I don't mind paying attention to something else for a while as it happens. At good times I see 7KB/s and better so a couple of MB is no big deal, but I still need to think about 100MB. At bad times I have literally seen 200B/s; I'm sorry, even for just passive downloads this is time to try again later. So, suppose I am using my Java word processor and I select some option which was not part of the basic initial download and it needs to go get an overlay from the net and in the middle of writing I find that I am facing a 20 minute download because the net is in crawl mode. Am I going to even dare interrupt the download to try for a save so I can continue later when I have no local storage? My bet is that some other major technology change intervenes before this kind of scenario really works.

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