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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 297.0/June 1,
2007
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HEADLINES:
- The
Week / The Exaflood is Coming
- Friday
Feature / Huber: Germs and the City
- Friday Blogger Bonus / New CNN Video on
Microvision's PicoP
- Readings /
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The
Week /
The Exaflood is Coming
Gilder
Telecosm Forum Member #1 (5/29/07): Would you agree that EZchip (LNOP) is also
unnecessary for an all-optical network? After all, it is electronic, right?
George Gilder (5/29/07): When the
optical network reaches all the way to the end computer, some electronic device
will be needed to accept the flow of packets from the optoelectronic
transceiver, read them, and route them to the various functions within the
computer. That device would have to handle packets at fiberspeed at seven
layers (it would have to do TCP termination and assembly) and decryption and
anti-malware, and perhaps decoding and rendering as well. It would resemble in
many respects a network processor and it would perform the most exacting task
in the computer.
By this time, however, the computer will have been largely hollowed out
and dispatched across the net, to datacenters and application servers of
various kinds, and the device with the processor might be a teleputer in your
hearing aid or Microvision (MVIS) shades. In any case, the hollowed out
computer will have to have NPUs in it to distribute its tasks, as the central
processor becomes increasingly a communications device. NP15 anyone?
But this is all a fantasy too many years ahead to pin down (and pins too
will be gone by then on Cubic Wafers).
As to the exaflood that I used to write about in 1999, it is indeed coming
now as uTube et al go high def and it is creating huge new demand on the
network, accelerating the day of all-optical systems. I own Infinera
through Kleiner Perkins so I am happy with its IPO, but all-optical systems
should obsolete it with a few years.
Still it is my view that compute functions will remain electronic. The
all-optical computer is a special purpose device, as even Terry Turpin says
(come and see him at Telecosm 2007).
The all-optical system will need many electronic servants.
Gilder
Telecosm Forum Member #2 (5/29/07): Can the in-house NPU developer's such as Acatel (ALU)
develop apace with EZchip?
George Gilder (5/29/07): I doubt
it. The in-house team will likely be less competent and lower on the learning
curve. It will lack volume, fail to command the attention of company
executives, suffer distraction from custom demands, and will not be fully
exposed to the upside.
The trend is toward outside NPUs, even at Cisco (CSCO), which is
the bellwether.
Gilder
Telecosm Forum Member #3 (5/29/07): I think this is a classic innovator's dilemma. The NPU
team at ALU is going to need to ask for corporate resources (capital and
people) to maintain leading edge performance. Listen to Cisco's last call.
Chambers said they are increasingly a software company. Juniper (JNPR)
and Redback (RBAK) have long-maintained their differential is in the
software not the hardware. In my last meeting with Juniper I asked about the
trend of NPUs "hollowing out the router" and value migrating out of
the router companies to the merchant silicon. The notion was roundly dismissed,
again because the value is in software not the hardware.
Now consider ALU attempting over the long-run to justify and maintain an
internal source of commodity hardware components. Think of EZchip like DeBeers
Diamonds. Would it make sense for one jewelry retailer to maintain its own
diamond mine and be vertically integrated for long? Only until the monopolist
(EZchip) was able to drive his cost of production below the vertically
integrated producer's cost. Then vertical integration becomes a handicap. The
internal NPU provided a real window of opportunity in terms of performance for
ALU and RBAK, but my guess is that window will be closed in 2008 and 2009 when
the full suite of JNPR boxes is on the market and the CSCO upgrades are rolling
out. In my opinion, RBAK saw the window closing when VZ decided it could wait
to buy JNPR's future products, rather than RBAK's current product advantage,
and sold to ERIC. ALU will see the window closing on its performance advantage
and will need to then rationalize the costs of its products... getting rid of
the internal diamond mine would be the way to go.
How about this for a transaction... EZchip buys the ALU NPU group and
agrees to support the current ALU products through 2009 and in turn ALU makes a
commitment to use the NP-3 or NP-4 in its next generation boxes.
Log on with your subscriber password at http://www.gildertech.com/board/ to read more posts
by George Gilder and the GILDER TELECOSM FORUM members.
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Friday Feature / Peter Huber: Germs and
the City
Two
centuries of success against infectious disease have left us complacent—and
vulnerable.
There
have been at work among us three great social agencies: the London City
Mission; the novels of Mr. Dickens; the cholera.” Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb
quotes this reductionist observation at the end of her chapter on Charles
Dickens in The Moral Imagination; her debt is to an English
nonconformist minister, addressing his flock in 1853. It comes as no surprise
to find the author of Hard Times and Oliver Twist discussed
alongside Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill in a book on moral history. Nor is
it puzzling to see Dickens honored in his own day alongside the City Mission, a
movement founded to engage churches in aiding the poor. But what’s V.
cholerae doing up there on the dais beside the Inimitable Boz? It’s being
commended for the tens of millions of lives it’s going to save. The nastiness
of this vile little bacterium has just transformed ancient sanitary rituals and
taboos into a new science of epidemiology. And that science is about to launch
a massive—and ultimately successful—public effort to rid the city of infectious
disease.
The
year 1853, when a Victorian doctor worked out that cholera spread through
London’s water supply, was the turning point. Ordinary people would spend the
next century crowding into the cities, bearing many children, and thus
incubating and spreading infectious disease. Public authorities would do all
they could to wipe it out. For the rest of the nineteenth century, they lost
more ground than they gained, and microbes thrived as never before. Then the
germ killers caught up—and pulled ahead. When Jonas Salk announced his polio
vaccine to the press in April 1955, the war seemed all but over. “The time has
come to close the book on infectious disease,” declared William Stewart, the
U.S. surgeon general, a few years later. “We have basically wiped out infection
in the United States.”
By
then, however, infectious diseases had completed their social mission. Public
authorities had taken over the germ-killing side of medicine completely. The
focus shifted from germs to money—from social disease to social economics. As
germs grew less dangerous, people gradually lost interest in them, and ended up
fearing germ-killing medicines more than the germs themselves.
Government
policies expressed that fear, putting the development, composition,
performance, manufacture, price, and marketing of antibiotics and vaccines
under closer scrutiny and control than any public utility’s operations and
services. The manufacturers of these drugs, which took up the germ-killing
mission where the sewer commission left off, must today operate like big
defense contractors, mirror images of the insurers, regulatory agencies, and
tort-litigation machines that they answer to. Most drug companies aren’t
developing any vaccines or antibiotics any more. The industry’s critics
discern no good reason for this at all: as they tell it, the big drug companies
just can’t be bothered.
These
problems capture our attention only now and again; they hardly figure in the
much louder debate about how much we spend on doctors and drugs, and who should
pay the bills. “Public health” (in the literal sense) now seems to be one
thing, and—occasional lurid headlines notwithstanding—not a particularly
important one, while “health care” is quite another.
We
will bitterly regret this shift, and probably sooner rather than later. As
another Victorian might have predicted—he published a book on the subject in
1859—germs have evolved to exploit our new weakness. Public authorities are
ponderous and slow; the new germs are nimble and fast. Drug regulators are
paralyzed by the knowledge that error is politically lethal; the new germs make
genetic error—constant mutation—the key to their survival. The new germs don’t
have to be smarter than our scientists, just faster than our lawyers. The
demise of cholera, one could say, has been one of the great antisocial
developments of modern times.
By
withdrawing from the battlefield just long enough to let us drift into this
state of indifference, the germs have set the stage for their own spectacular
revival. Germs are never in fact defeated completely. If they retire for a
while, it’s only to search, in their ingeniously stupid and methodically random
way, for a bold new strategy. They’ve also contrived, of late, to get human
sociopaths to add thought and order to the search. The germs will return. We
won’t be ready.
Read
Peter Huber’s Complete Article in the City Journal:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_germs.html
|
The Gilder
Telecosm Forum Register
today using your GTR password to gain entry into the web’s premier
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Friday Blogger Bonus /
Microvision (MVIS) Blog (5/31/07): New CNN Video
on Microvision's PicoP
The Mini Video Projector (video).
Check Out the Microvision Blog:
http://microvision.blogspot.com/
____________________________________
Readings /
The
Weekly GTI
http://www.gtindex.com/
YouTube for Apple TV Uses H.264, Not FLASH
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070531-studies-music-industry-overstating-threat-of-p2p-piracy.html
Google Zooms in Too Close for Some
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/technology/01private.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin
Decoding Your DNA Destiny
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/05/31/genetic-testing-dna-tech-cx_mh_rl_0531dna_land.html
Studies:
music industry overstating threat of P2P piracy
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070531-studies-music-industry-overstating-threat-of-p2p-piracy.html
Dell
To Chop 7,000 Workers
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/06/dell_to_chop_70.html
__________________________________________
FRIDAY LETTER STAFF
Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
Research: Sandy Fleischmann / sfleischmann@gilder.com
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