Is networking likely to remain a major force of change over the next 1,000 years?
A large part of the history of mankind is of transportation getting faster. Last century, communications started getting faster, too. As that happened, it started to displace transportation. The biggest trend I can see is the continuing substitution of comunication for transportation. So, as the Internet, or something like it, continues to evolve, we’ll have more and more communication and less and less transportation. The upside of that is obvious: We’ll have less reliance on fossil fuels and less need for public works. And people won’t have to be traveling away from their families so much, since they’ll be able to communicate more. Sounds like the basis for Metcalfe’s law. I didn’t even name it. But the concept is real. When I was selling Ethernet as a concept, I had to explain the fact that people were trying networking, connecting their PCs together, and the experiments were failing. Potential customers were failing to see the value. I was trying to sell them e-mail and printer sha
