On Sun, 03 December 2000, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:

Since you have have chosen to ignore kc's "meta-operational content warning"

On Sat, 02 December 2000, k claffy wrote:

...

[meta-operational content warning. followup thread probably belongs on some other list]

andrew odlyzko's latest http://www.cisp.org/imp/november_2000/odlyzko/11_00odlyzko.htm

I feel entitled to respond.

First of all, your comments all appear to be based on the paper you cite, namely

http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/high.network.cost.txt

This is an entirely different paper on a different subject. (Moreover, just like the article kc cites, it is just a short overview of more detailed papers.) It is sort of like kc saying "Sean's new-born son is cute," and my responding "But his two-year old daughter is ugly." Either statement may be right or wrong, but there is little connection between them.

I skipped over that paper because the basic topic in your paper "Myth of Internet growth Numbers" was covered extensively on this list when the "doubling every 90 days" number was first published a couple of years ago. I think the original source was traced back to a comment made by Mike O'Dell at UUNET. If I recall the conclusion at the time was, at best, the comment was taken very much out of context. You point out that politicians and venture capitalists continue to cite the number to support their projects. Ok, I suppose someone had to say the emperor isn't wearing clothes. But I thought you had some more interesting ideas in the other papers. I think the growth claim is a bit like the last place television channel announcing "they have the fastest growing newscast." It is much easier to double a small number than a large number. But eventually you run out of new viewers. The interesting question isn't why is the Internet acting like a Ponzi scheme. The interesting question is when will the Internet growth curve change from going straight up to an S-shaped curve? Every once in a while, someone will plot the Internet growth curve against the television growth curve, FM radio growth curve, CD player growth curve, etc. The problem is we can't compare them yet, because we don't know where the bend in the Internet growth curve is, yet. So, does you data show the knee was in 1995-1996? Or are we still on the exponential part of the curve? If we are past the knee, its bad news for all the carriers, new and old, since stock price is mostly based on future growth expectation.