Hi Gary,
"Traffic will always need to be routed and to suggest otherwise is simply stupid."
I beg your pardon, but I thought that routing "was" simple, relative to traditional networking, and that it already supported stupid networking. Although, as I've pointed out in other areas on SI, internet-routing is already one of the oldest forms of legacy networking in use today. Even SS7 and ATM are fifteen and twenty years younger than TCP/IP, respectively.
I hope you appreciated that little play on words ;-)
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Actually, I find myself agreeing with both you and Dan on different points. Backing Dan, one cannot suggest that Gilder's articles are irrelevant because they are too early, or that most of his works don't stand the test of time.
The case in point that I like to use was his treatment about eight or nine years ago that was titled "beyond the fiber sphere." I read this article back in December of '92 or early January of '93. I spent a good deal of time sending faxed copies of it to friends of mine throughout the industry. [Yes, we had scanners equipped with OCR and at least two email accounts at the office back then, but others didn't. For sure, Forbes wasn't publishing their aricles over the Web at that time, either.]
One of my counterparts at TCG sent a copy, in turn, to a one of today's pre-eminent dark fiber players, who has since been mentioned rather prominently by George in several of the GTR mailings. It's a very, very small world, when you think of it.
In the fiber sphere article I found, for the first time in a publicly presented form, a sense of vindication for the direction in which I had attempted taking some of my banking and brokerage clients (with only marginal success, I might add, due to the heresy of what I was proposing at the time) during the previous five years, when dark fiber networking was all but non-existent.
This was during the era in which Bell Atlantic talked Corning into coming out with a Bandwidth Limiter!!, an inline optical dispersion unit designed to introduce a 200 Mb/s "cutoff" at 2 km so that the ILEC might begin experimenting with limited FDDI and Ethernet over dark, without _giving _away _the _store_ .
Even though dark didn't become a mainstream topic of discussion -- much less a salable commodity -- until many years later, it was always a goal from that point on that someone could aspire to, while holding up this article and pointing to it as a source of agreement and justification... even if it was only in the proponent's own mind. Being the only person in the crowd with an absolutely fantabulous idea, only to have the idea go unappreciated, or worse, unnoticed, can cause one to feel very lonely.
As both you and Dan have pointed out, however, George has indeed committed his share of mistakes, too. And self-contradicting statements at times, I might add, that go largely unnoticed by the layman due to subtleties and because of the flare and excitement caused by the new monthly topic, or "pick," that happens to be at hand.
Such a contradiction, in my eyes, can be seen in his bestowing praise upon TERN for getting into copper based networking. What's that about? He should be turning rocks over looking for FTTH players, not another dsl purveyor. And squeezing more information through black coaxial's return path? Com'on.
I'm not attempting to denigrate or lessen the value of TERN here. Just as I wouldn't attempt to reduce the stature of any other Cable TV or DSL supplier-vendor. Rather, I am merely pointing out that their move into dsl and other tried and true (some backwards looking) technologies, while potentially very brilliant and profitable, was anything but fiber-spheric, when you come right down to it.
And in another example, citing the benefits of another company's approach, positioning that such and thus was a better way to catch a mouse because the alternative method would have required too many transistors and processors?
That struck a small nerve in me because once, as a retort to a point I made on this very thread, George commented that bandwidth would some day be as free as transistors were, referring to the growing number of millions of transistors that sit on a single sliver of wafer.
But these types of observations are nit-pickin' and probably unique to my own filtration process, so they tend to sail under the proverbial bridge unless they are brought to the fore. And they probably should sail under, because by and large they are petty observations, anyway.
In my view George brings a much-needed set of views in readable terms to masses of readers who can stand to receive all the enlightenment they can get in these photonic times, despite the illusion sometimes that there are hallucinogens at work behind some of the things he puts forth if you don't have the benefit of continuity of reading from his previous works.
It refreshes the senses to have his and other letters like his sent to me once a month. No, I don't bet the ponies when the email versions appear in my mail box. Whenever I get to read them I find that they usually stand in sharp contrast to pundits and journos who hop from rag to rag and from web site to web site, and who don't have an original thought between them.
What sometimes does bother, however, about the George Gilder phenomenon -- to the point of distraction, sometimes -- is the element within his readership and forum membership that approaches uncontrolled sycophancia.
Granted, they represent only a small percentage of readers and forum goers, but they tend to ruin the experience for many others.
Far from being turned off by his views, or considering them a disservice, I find that I can usually enjoy reading his work at most times even when I don't agree with him, even if I think he is entirely off the mark on any given issue. And there are times when I think he goes over the line with his own enthusiasm on issues that I consider to be non-events, as I've alluded to in one or two cases, above.
As far as victimization and disservice goes... there are no victims, there are only volunteers. And those who can use a good consultant ;-)
FAC |
