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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (163)	11/1/1999 5:00:00 AM
From: Jay Lowe	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1782

>> whether these are the sorts of combinations you had in mind I dunno ... just starting to look around in the meta-web frame myself. I think the "networking" paradigm is dying right in front of us ... that world view consisting of multiple competing vendors of sometimes-interoperating gear particularly managed by individual, episodic, ad-hoc human negotiation. Cisco, Lucent ... the gorillas of this paradigm ... where is their thunder? In the generation now ending? I think ... The signs of the shift are falling into place. 1. These companies you mention are forming business models a step beyond the boxes-and-wires world-view. 2. The caching guys and other old/new virtualization technologies are showing the crystal edges that will snap into place given appropriate catalysts. 3. Internet 2, NGI, vBNS 4. The practical impediments of supply (bandwidth) and demand (killer broadband apps) are being eroded ... leaps of supply and demand will stress the existing humanly-managed model to a degree beyond it's ability to scale. I don't mean you can't scale the internet ... I mean we can't scale the ManualWeb fast enough to ... what? ... to hold back the MetaWeb. 5. We already see the pathways starting to form in the efforts mentioned in #3 above ... research and commerce are already coming together. None of these projects is "fully envisioned", all have limited mandates ... but this will change ... and the structure of organizational interaction will already be in place to absorb the larger mandate ... which will evolve incrementally. Possible additions to your interesting candidates list. 1. Sun + ? 2. Anyone with LOTS of money and an acquisitive nature: CSCO, MSFT 3. Be on the lookout for some small dark horse company with a crew of old operating system programmers who invent a virtual web intelligence system ... it would necessarily be an open platform which could accept multiple vendor plug-ins for resource and policy management. Way interesting problem. A meta-OS ... an open system for adding cooperating automatic intelligence to web management. Think of it this way ... take all the layers of management currently happening to keep the web alive and happy ... and create an electronic universe in which all these currently human interactions operate automatically. Yep ... I think that's the key ... the solution will not evolve from the rough-and-tumble of competing companies ... the solution will leapfrog that model ... it will be catholic, multi-vendor. I suspect such a system can only come forth from a "virgin" source ... no one vendor could push their approach onto the existing chaos ... and the problem is too complicated for a committee ... it requires a small, inspired team approach. The land of meta-infrastructure.

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (163)	11/1/1999 4:28:00 PM
From: GHowe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1782

As MFNX paid over 115x trailing LQA revenues for ABOV, what do you make of its value? Could these others be worth that much, or was that a one-time event? And as, say, an EXDS already has a market cap of over $7 billion on revenues that will be in the neighborhood of $225 million this year, would the price that a WCOM would have to pay be worth that kind of money? I fall more in to the camp that says the WCOMs, QWSTs, etc, would rather bury EXDS and others than buy them, however I am open to differing opinions. I believe that this is particularly true as we move more to a transactional Internet rather than a content-based Internet. Regards, GHowe