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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (2586)	12/15/1998 9:23:00 AM
From: RocketMan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

Frank, I think you the nail on the head: Even though there are other forces at work that will push bandwidth demands through the roof at some point in the future, many of the specialized enterprise and government networks that are NOW rising quickly in overall resource requirements, including bandwidth usage, will actually top out at some point when the internal needs of those individual private entities are satisfied, and these should NOT be used for extrapolatory purposes. I think this applies to any new technology and any group that adopts the technology. With any new technology there is a period of slow acceptance in which only the advanced guard exploit its benefits. If the benefits are not conmensurate with the cost of switching from current practices, or if the advanced guard do not do a proper job of proselytizing the rest of the group, it either dies or becomes a niche technology to a certain group, like CB radio. But if the technology makes enough of an inroads, then there is explosive growth as the needs of the group are satisfied, then the technology adoption saturates that group and infects other groups. As new groups (academia, government, companies) go through the cycle, you can get anomalous readings as to the global rate of adoption by taking data from groups at different levels. Depending on the group and its adoption status, you could conclude that the technology is slow to being adopted, is explosively growing, or is slowing in demand. UUnet probably was/is in their explosive rate when they made their "doubling every 100 days" statement, which has become a meme about internet growth in general. This is not new. Interestingly, I was searching around the other day and came across an earlier 1995 meme, the "53-day meme." According to Jakob Nielsen, a Sun engineer: "One frequently finds newspaper or magazine articles about the Internet or the World Wide Web stating that the number of servers on the WWW is doubling every 53 days, "according to a source at Sun Microsystems." Well, I am that source, and I don't believe the 53-day estimate any more." To his credit, Nielsen recognized that he had been looking at a particular portion of a growth curve, and related it to "Bass curves" for innovation diffusion, which are s-curves depicting mathematically the type of growth we are discussing. You can find Nielsen's discussion of this phenomenon at sun.com