A couple days ago, The Fat Guy Scott Chaffin observed in the comments that George Gilder’s view of dumb networks with smart edges had hurt the industry, and yesterday, as if on cue, Gilder had an Op-Ed in the Journal, Broadband’s Narrow Minds, in which he blamed the failure of the US telecom industry on government regulations:
But all this bandwidth is useless if it is not connected to homes and offices. Deployed through the world economy and extended to final users, optical wavelength technology can still unleash the boom in broadband video teleconferencing, education, and entertainment anticipated by the stock market during the late 1990s. But to fulfill this promise, Washington can no longer treat the industry as a political cash cow or plaything. The industry’s customers and shareholders, and the nation’s economy, deserve better.
Gilder’s a weird character. He works for the ultra-conservative Discovery Institute, an organization whose chief obsession is with Intelligent Design, a great load of snake oil if there ever was one. That doesn’t prove he’s a poor prognosticator, of course, but you can decide that for yourself after looking at the next heaping morsel of snake oil goodness I’ve prepared for you.
Back in 1995, Gilder wrote an article for Forbes ASAP predicting changes to the computer industry that would come about as a result of the consumerization of the Internet. In short, he said that Marc Andreessen would be the next Bill Gates, and that Sun’s Java would make Windows and the PC obsolete. A few months ago, Andreessen quietly sold his LoudCloud web hosting service to EDS, and he’s now sunk beneath the radar. Java’s an interesting widget, but it’s most commonly used on Windows, Bill Gates is still the only Bill Gates in town, and we’re all waiting for real broadband and applications that might leverage it.
Even more interesting are the responses Forbes printed from industry figures going pro and con on Gilder’s predictions. Many endorsed his view, although most of those who did had a self-serving reason for doing so, but the genuine smart guys didn’t – that would include Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Nathan Myhrvold, and a few others. One comment from Grove rings especially true as a correction to the Intelligent Design people and others who believe in miracles:
Five years from now, my computer will still be connected to an ordinary phone line and to ISDN, but also to broadband networks via a cable modem and to an ATM network to reach other lucky computer users; and probably to do some kind of wireless connection. Ten years from now, it will be another set of communications transport media. But it will never be a single superconnection, because goodness doesn’t arrive in a single step. It comes a little at a time.
If you enjoy saying I told you so, or the view from the rear view mirror generally, this is fun stuff.
Looking backwards is probably the one thing that Gilder himself does well; Open Source libertarian Eric Raymond and others have claimed that the consumer Internet was not originally a military tool, but Gilder shows that it was a RAND employee, Paul Baran, trying to solve a military problem (second strike missile command and control) who did the seminal design work and has the papers to prove it. Gilder wrote this up in Inventing the Internet Again.
The only dispute on authorship would be that the Internet Baran envisioned was more powerful in terms of real-time and QoS than the one that was eventually lashed together by ARPA contractors with less insight into network fundamentals, excessive faith in queueing theory, and less concern for future needs.
Gilder is a strange man.
In the 1970s and 1980s, his analyses of the problems of the welfare state were gut-wrenchingly honest and incisive. Having seen and been a part of that world, I know he was right on the money. And his policy recommendations in that regard have been vindicated by time.
But then he came to the defense of Michael Milkin and his Ponzi schemes. And his views on high-tech, while basically insightful in some ways, were woefully inadequate in others.
It always seemed obvious to me from the git-go that Java was never going to be what its evangelists envisioned. What you’re essentially saying is that an environment piggybacked on another environment is the wave of the future. Quite a bold leap. And right off the cliff, as it turns out.
What the world needs is a celebrity boxing match between Gilder and Nicholas Negroponte. Bill it as “Rumble of the Annoying Visionaries”, and make the ropes out of “dark fibre”.
Amusingly enough, back in the day (’96, I think) I upgraded to Win95 so I could try Java out. I guess I was supposed to go buy a Sun box instead… silly me.
Well, Java could actually have made Windows and PC a lot less relevant if Sun had had a brain. The first time I ran J was on a 68k Mac. I almost threw my monitor out the window. This POS is what all the hype’s about? Then I looked at the API. Even the friggin’ Director API was more functional.
IMNSHO, Sun can’t do anything right. Instead of encouraging developers to add missing functionality by using native code (DLLs to be called from Java), the idiots at Sun came up with the “100% Pure Java” program: http://www.tolstoy.com/impure.html
I’ll cut a long story short with this: if Sun had been in MS’s position, and MS were a small startup who came out with Java, Sun would not just be near a penny stock, they’d be BK by now.