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Unfulfillable
expectations
By Scott Bradner
Why do so many good
technical people prefer to plan the future based on their wishful thinking
rather than finding out what the facts are?
The particular thing
that got me wondering about this was yet another instance where some people
asserted that in the near future there was going to be an explosion of cheap
Internet bandwidth for individual users. Not quite repeating the claim that
bandwidth was going to be too cheap to measure which is popular with some
people, but getting close. The identity of these specific myth spreaders is
unimportant only because they are far from alone in their belief. It would be
easy to do a little checking and figure out just how much money that the fiber
people, like Quest, MFS, and Project Oxygen (www.oxygen.org), and the ISPs, like MCI,
GTE/BBN, and UUNET, are planning on spending. The spending plans are far in
excess of the current $3.3 Billion per year total annual revenue for ISPs in
the US. This would seem to indicate that unless these companies are suddenly
about to become somewhat more altruistic than their previous histories would
indicate that cheap bandwidth is a pipe dream. An attractive pipe dream but a
pipe dream none the less.
But this is far from the
only example of this sort of reality disconnect. A few years ago we saw this in
the assumption that ATM was going to replace all other networking technology.
We see it today in the apparent belief that most Internet users already have
some level of high speed access, judging that belief by the amount of graphics
that all too many web page designers put on their pages.
Even a bit of thinking
would have indicated that any wholesale replacement of network infrastructure
with ATM was not in the cards, there are just too many alternatives, too much
installed base and besides that, the network technologists were not about to
stop thinking when ATM was designed--new technologies were bound to be
developed.
It would seem to me to
be very broken thinking to design web pages that take many minutes to download,
with much of that time taken in transferring complex advertisements, and expect
that Internet users will be all that happy to deal with you and come back for
more abuse.
What is it that causes
this type of inability or unwillingness to recognize reality?
Clearly some of the
problem comes from a need to attract venture capital and sell products. Clear
impressive stories are easier to sell than ones with qualifiers. Some also
comes from the surface knowledge of the issues that many network managers and
technology writers possess. On the web side, showing your boss a web page that
is designed for the connectivity that the real user has is not all that
rewarding an experience.
But the basic issue may
be just that complexity is a pain and it takes time and makes people's heads
hurt to actually think through the implications of reality.
disclaimer: Harvard's
organizational structure can make my head hurt but the above are my musings.