[9395] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Internet/ISOC/Cabbages and Kings
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roger Bohn)
Mon Jan 3 22:17:27 1994
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 1994 18:13:54 -0800
To: com-priv@psi.com
From: Rbohn@ucsd.edu (Roger Bohn)
At 3:28 PM 1/3/94 -0500, Vinton G. Cerf wrote:
>The Internet has become a global phenomenon and, in a very
>short time, caught the attention of the business sector,
>education, libraries, and the general public. Dealing with
>all the attention is a major challenge and charting technical
>direction vital - the IETF has a critical role to play in
>all of this and I hope we will collectively prove equal to
>the challenge.
Beware of reporters bearing gifts.
I have no desire to fan the discussion on ISOC, but I am beginning to
notice (unfortunate) parallels to the situation of:
Artificial Intelligence and expert systems in about 1985,
Biotech in about 1989.
Neural networks today?
In those cases, the hype/substance ratio passed a critical threshold of
say 20, and a bunch of academics decided to spin off their own companies
from academia. They were able to raise large amounts of venture capital,
due in large part to lay press's interest and credulity about the power and
imminent commercial value of their specialty. The fact that earnings were
negative was ignored for a number of years. In both cases, a number of
faculty got modestly rich, a lot of investors got burned when the bubbles
burst, and a lot of corporate types got turned off. Neural networks seem
to be entering into a smaller version of the same phenomenon today.
Yet in all these cases, these _are_ useful and legitimate technologies,
with commercial applications (although not necessarily in the form
envisioned by the original academics, and definitely not with the ease of
applicability they claimed). The hype, however, got in the way of real
progress.
The Internet situation is not an exact parallel, of course. For example
there is a large and somewhat different corporate push coming from media
and communications companies. (Similar, perhaps, to the way the
pharmaceutical companies jumped on the biotech bandwagon.) But if the
analogy holds, we will see a lot of companies marketing themselves as
"insiders to the Internet", and trying to start up or go public with
astronomical P/E ratios. A note of healthy caution is in order.
The causal factor is not necessarily internal to the technology, but comes
from the lay press and the way it jumps on a fad. Hold on to your seats.
Roger Bohn Rbohn@ucsd.edu
International Relations and Pacific Studies
University of California, San Diego
Phone (619) 534-7630
Fax (619) 534-3939
