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page 9 of 10
Goliath
At Bay
Today I believe
the bandwidth tidal wave will sweep away the notions of Gates and Myhrvold
of a smooth middleband transition for Microsoft and its boob-tube collaborators.
Increasingly released from regulatory restrictions, bandwidth is now expanding
far faster than MIPS and bits (see Forbes ASAP, “The Bandwidth Tidal
Wave,” Dec. 5, 1994). Over the next five years, for example, @Home
will increase the bandwidth to home and small-business computers by a
factor of thousands. While Moore’s Law doubles computer power every
18 months, the law of the telecosm, by the most conservative possible
measure, doubles total bandwidth every 12 months.
This adds up. Over the next decade, computers will improve a hundredfold
while bandwidth will expand a thousandfold.
Until this year, the computer and software industries have drafted behind
Moore’s Law, while hiding behind what Roger McNamee has dubbed “Moron’s
Law”—the telecom regulations that stifle bandwidth expansion.
The industry thus has thrived by employing MIPS and bits as a replacement
for bandwidth by using compression, decompression, switching speed, and
logic circuitry to make up for the constrained bandwidth of public networks.
Grove capped off this tradition in early October, in a memorable keynote
address, following South African president Nelson Mandela to the podium,
at the Telecom 95 quadrennial exposition in Geneva. Grove wowed the large
audience of telco potentates with an on-stage real-time demonstration
of Intel’s Proshare teleconferencing technology. And yet, what chiefly
struck the viewer was the mediocrity of the partial-screen facial images.
They were far lower in resolution than ordinary television.
As long as the pictures are inferior to TV images, PC teleconferencing
will remain chiefly a niche or a stunt. As bandwidth expands powerfully
over the next decade, it will seem increasingly perverse to substitute
processing for bandwidth, and more and more inviting to substitute bandwidth
for processing.
The logic of MIPS and bandwidth works both ways. Not only can processing
make up for bandwidth, but bandwidth, as Claude Shannon pointed out in
1948, can serve as a substitute for switching and other computer functions.
With bandwidth now expanding faster than processing speeds, new architectures
will prevail by substituting bandwidth for MIPS and bits. Today, the bulk
of bandwidth to homes is coaxial cable laid over the last 25 years by
the cable television industry. Exploiting that bandwidth for the Internet
is the single greatest opportunity in the history of information technology.
HAVING ASCERTAINED that Doerr had been meeting regularly with all the
pioneers of the new paradigm that Andreessen was “mind-melding”
with Medin, and that Malone had been consulting with Doerr and McNealy,
I ask McNealy whether he has talked to Medin.
“No,” he answers, “I have not talked with Medin at all
. . . since lunch on Wednesday. But back then he and I had sore necks
from basically agreeing with what the other was saying. We’re fighting
like crazy to become the standard platform for Medin’s environment.
Our companies are incredibly well aligned. We have a list of about 12
engineering efforts that we are undertaking and driving at Medin’s
request. The power of a network comes from the number of nodes times the
bandwidth. By this measure, the @Home opportunity is as big as there is.”
McNealy revealed that the day before in his office at Sun, he saw the
demo of “a diskless, CD-less, floppyless, OS-less computer, and it
was great. It had just about every bus, serial and parallel and S-bus,
and every kind of interface you can imagine. With connectors on all four
sides, it was a model for what I call a zero-administration client.
“Consider: If you give a user a disk drive, a CD, a floppy, an OS
and 16 megabytes of memory, you have made him, whether he wants it or
not, a system administrator. He has so many resources to manage. What
they showed me yesterday was a virtual machine written in Java, and it
booted up instantly off flash ROM and ran like crazy because the virtual
machine rides so close on the hardware.”
Echoing Medin and Corrigan, McNealy evoked the future of the teleputer:
“Put a touch screen on it and make it a kiosk, put a large screen
on it and make it a workstation, put in an infrared detector and make
it a set-top box, put a joystick on it and make a game machine, put a
cable modem or an ISDN port on it and make it a PC or a digital phone.
You never run out of disk space; you never have to back it up; it’s
mirrored so you never lose your files. You have an uninterruptible power
supply. Your phone or cable line is much more reliable than your hard
drive on your PC. You get used to the security of the system with no disks
to corrupt and with Java programs that execute only in a virtual machine
and cannot invade your system.” McNealy might have added, in ecumenical
concern for Larry Ellison’s mother, “Put in some Oracle code
and you have a terrific, cheap database client in an emerging world of
far-flung databases.”
All the participants in the new regime agree. Combined with a broadband
network, the teleputer will be more flexible and powerful than existing
PCs. Rolling out both the network and the teleputer will be the central
activity in the industry over the next two years. Responding to it will
be the principal challenge to Gates and Grove, and possibly a route of
redemption for their companies.
All the leading figures in this Silicon Valley renaissance have endured
recent periods of trial and failure. Malone suffered the collapse of his
Bell Atlantic merger in 1994 and the long stagnation of his stock. Corrigan
suffered physical collapse and the slump of his company. McNealy endured
a long tunnel of shrinking market share as his SuperSPARC processor proved
too complex to keep pace with rivals. Clark of Netscape lost influence
at Silicon Graphics, the company he had founded, and finally had to leave
in order to retain his self-respect. Even Doerr lost his touch for several
years.
For Bill Gates, however, business life has been an almost unrelenting
ascent toward riches untold for one so young. In the end, his success
has made him seem a bionic business leader leached of his humanity.
His company has appeared to government and to competitors alike as a monopoly
threat, targeting existing rivals and systematically suppressing them,
rather than creating new products and industries. Much the same is said
of Intel.
Perhaps this is the time for the Wintel team to face a domestic challenge.
From it they may well emerge stronger. Without them, it is clear, the
Internet will be weaker. Only from the crucible of competition between
paradigms can emerge a robust and redemptive new economy of information.
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