I would have chosen Alan Greenspan as Net Person of the Year. It's his economic policies that are making the investment of venture capital and the IPO funding of the net possible.
hoard Firewire. Net result: Manufacturers moved to USB.
While Firewire won't be used on mice and keyboards, it certainly IS a major success in the arena of video. Every digital camcorder in production now comes with Firewire. Sony and HP as well as Apple have Firewire on most of their PC's.
Firewire is also the standard interconnect for video in HDTV products - the only thing holding it back is the MPA's slowness to certify an encryption standard for these data streams.
Intel wishes Firewire would go away because they dont control it like they do with USB. The problem is that it isn't going away, and USB can't do what Firewire does.
but how to do it in Beijing, Outer Mongolia, or Sudan.
They can do whatever they want in their own countries, but if they try to import their products to a country that recognizes copyrights, they have a problem.
I know a lot of people don't like the WTO, but one of the effects of the WTO is getting countries like China to recognize copyrights internally.
someone writes A2B.diff and releases package B, derived from your package A, under the GPL (assuming that your license permits this)
I think that the problem with this is that under copyright law the original author own the rights to derivative works. This may prevent the author of A2B from releasing B under the GPL because this author does not own the copyright to B.
Of course he can release the patch under GPL, and all that implies, but I don't think he can do anything witht he license of B.
Rather, in Canada, the "civil" side of the law is descended from Napoleonic law. And a good set of consistent standards they are; the 'Mericans can learn a thing or two from us.
Actually the only part of Canada's legal system that decended from Napoleonic Law is the state system in Quebec. Which is very similar to what is practiced in the State of Louisiana in the US.
For that matter, there must be SOME lawyers that would be willing to take on SUN or COREL both for a fraction of the damages and for the publicity they would get as a "defender of public software shamefully stolen".
Indeed. The loss by many large corporations to lawsuits brought under a variety of contingency agreements is in fact proof that large corporations are vulnerable, no matter how big and powerful they are. Johns-Manville and Dow Corning are bankrupt. Phillip-Morris is hurting. Union Carbide was decimated. Hooker Chemical no longer exists.
If somebody does violate the GPL, they ARE vulnerable.
The benefits of forcing everyone to expand their domain knowledge and have a better overview of the system far outweigh the communication and ramp-up obstacles.
In the real world, a programmer quits on the average of every sixteen months. If that individual "owns" lots of code that others are not familiar with, the costs are enormous. It happens all the time.
Given that the average tenure is so short, teaching other people the code is still a waste of time because they too will be gone in 16 months.
When everyone is gone, what do you have? Code and the documentation. Except under Extreme Programming the code is built ad-hoc, and the documentation is non-existent.
In addition if you read Brooks, he had a rather different view of the programming process. It is very well known that GOOD programmers are as much as 1000 times more productive than average programmers. Brooks's methods were designed to take maximal advantage of the talent of the top programmer, rather than this pair-programming idea which seems to me designed to achieve least-common denominator code quality.
Rotating responsibilities is just one idea that has immense value outside of general XP practice.
I've worked in rotationg responsibility environments, in technical organizations outside the computer industry. Do you know what happens? Nobody is in a job long enough to become really proficient.
Did anyone actually take the time to look up the patent before first running off at the mouth???
The only one I could find listed at IBM's Patent Server is this:
US5897620: Method and apparatus for the sale of airline-specified flight tickets.
IT IS NOT A PATENT ON REVERSE AUCTIONS
It is in fact a technology related patent for processing certain kinds of airline ticket purchases. As far as I know, this idea was actually an original invention by Priceline, and they deserve to get a patent on it.
Claim 1 reads:
1. A method comprising the steps of:
viewing, using a computer, special fare listing information for air travel to a specified destination location from a specified departure location within a specified time range, said special fare listing information excluding a specified departure time; transmitting, using a computer, a request to purchase a commitment for carriage corresponding to said special fare listing information; receiving a commitment for carriage, including an obligation by an airline to provide a seat on a flight, that satisfies said request but does not specify a departure time; accepting said commitment for carriage; and receiving at a time subsequent to said accepting an identification of said departure time.
This patent is so narrow that anyone that is not just out there COPYING what other people are doing (like Microsoft often does) should be able to avoid it.
There have been other stories in the media about Microsoft attending venture capital meetings with Priceline and failing to reach a business agreement. (That I submitted and/. failed to post) At these meetings Microsoft demanded shares of Priceline at below IPO prices. All of this is so reminiscent of other previous Microsoft activities it should raise the hackles of anyone in the high tech industry. Microsoft is just repeating what they did to Stac here, and deserves to get sued by Priceline.
All of this is so similar to the previous rapacious behaviour of Microsoft there is no way I can find fault with either the patent system of what Priceline is doing.
Discoveries, laws of nature, mathematical algorithms, methods of doing business and the like are not eligible for patent protection. What the hell's up with the USPTO anyway?
I don't know where you got that document, but it is obsolete. The USPTO has been granting business method patents for a while now.
Who is to say that someone else in India didn't have the same idea years ago, but had neither the means (money), or the way(communication) to "patent" their idea.
Let me try to express the idea of the basic principle of a patent as simply as possible.
A patent is a contract between the inventor and the government to give you exclusive rights for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an invention rather than keeping it secret.
Now suppose the great Maharaja Nimoji came up with the idea for One-Click Shopping in the year 300 B.C. but didn't let his court scribe write down the idea in the Great Scroll of Nifty Sanskrit Inventions because he didn't want the other Maharajas using the technology.
Nobody can use the idea as a basis for further development of technology BECAUSE IT WASN'T PUBLISHED. The idea of the patent is very specific - IT IS TO ENCOURAGE THE PUBLICATION of technological ideas so that if the inventor croaks the idea won't be lost for 2295 years, like the M. Nimoji's invention of One-Click Shopping.
Nobody cares if One Click Shopping was invented but not recorded. It might as well not exist. The idea is to get people to release inventions to the public domain after some fixed period of exclusive rights so that they DON'T get lost, and people can freely use them.
People in the OSS don't seem to get this at all, but Patents really were designed to encourage the OPENING OF TECHNOLOGY. A patented idea in fact becomes public domain or FREE after a period of time.
The fundamental problem with patenting information is that you cannot exclude other people from having the same (or similar ideas) independently.
Your point being? People always give credit for inventions to the first person to develop the idea. Hell, I had the idea (quite independently) for the complex number plane when I was a 5th grader. Is it called the Eric Surface now? NooooOOOOOooo. Some other dude came up with the idea a few hundred years earlier.
And by the way, Metcalf's law is a crock, and a gross underestimate of the truth. Network connectivity scales O(N^N); thus the EXPONENTIAL (NOT O^2 or parabolic) growth of the internet. If we were doing (O^2) growth, we'd still be less than a million hosts.
If you want to argue that patent law should not be applied to (genomes, business models, software) fine. But leave all this other poorly thought out booshwaw behind.
Rotating programmers throughout a project?? Not only is that going to lead to unmaintainable code, but you'll have programmers working in areas that they know nothing about.
Rotating programmers is also very inefficient from a manpower useage point of view. Remember Brook's Mythical Man-Month? As you add people to a task, individual productivity decreases because of communications and learning time. It can get to the point where as you add people to a project, the entire project cycle lengthens.
Each time you rotate a programmer you are going to lose the time he takes coming up to speed. He is also likely to make a lot of mistakes during this period.
That assumes prior art considerations count. However, in the real world of current patent practice, it's not going to stop a competitor from obtaining a patent on your technique.
Think about what you said. The reason you can't get a patent on something that is already patented is because the original patent is PRIOR ART. If the patent office is ignoring prior art, patents don't prevent the competitor from getting a patent any more than a publication does.
Re:Let's have more integration between *BSD and Li
on
Intel using FreeBSD
·
· Score: 2
Also worth nothing that the BSD license allows them to take it proprietary, whereas with Linux it would have to stay opensource.
Since this is in fact a proprietary product it is obvious why BSD was selected. It was all about the license.
Personally I don't like the idea of a company taking code I write, and then selling it without me getting a piece of the action.
By the way, does anyone have mirror of the article? Daemon News is slashdotted.
That is 24% PER QUARTER. That is an TERRIFIC growth rate. Most companies do well to get 15% per year. Dell, one of the fastest growing companies I ever heard of has been growing at 50%/year in the past.
Nope. You don't need to patent it. All you have to do is publish the technology somewhere. In the sciences there is even a journal of anonymous submissions so you don't have to disclose the company/author just for that purpose.
The patent MIGHT be good for cross-licensing, but that is about it.
Odd... it seems to me that every time I turn around, Hubble has broken again... are we attacking the symptoms here or the disease, so to speak?
You might want to learn a little more about the Hubble mission. When this thing was put together, several servicing missions were anticipated to replace components as the wore out, and to upgrade or swap out instruments. These missions are planned on a three year cycle.
The ORIGINAL plan was to bring the Hubble back to earth for refitting every 5 years, however the ability of shuttle crews to do in-orbit servicing has made this unnecessary.
IN FACT, the Hubble has been one of the greatest successes of the entire space program.
This mission not only includes replacement of gyroscopes (that lasted longer than originally planned), but upgrading some instruments and the main Hubble computer system.
While Moore's law is an empirical observation, Metcalf's law is not. It is a mathematical law that the connectivity of a network is in fact O(N^N). These connections are the generators of value on the net.
Now perhaps someone will try to restrict access for political reasons. The Chinese certainly already have. But the Chinese are having to back away from their access restrictions because the economic consequences of these restrictions are so severe. There is an empirical law about the internet routing itself around such restrictions which I think will in the long run hold true.
One person here commented on using the Hobbes timeline. I found it very interesting that none of the curves shown there had inflection points (second derivatives = 0); that is growth of the internet is still accelerating.
Take the $2000 and extrapolate that over the life of the twisted pair phone network in the USA and it's a trivial investment.
Corporate capital investments are not made this way. AT&T could put this money in the bank and get 8% or so. It is having to borrow a considerable amount of capital to make some of these acquisitions at 8%. In order for this to be profitable an/or be worth the risk of the investment, AT&T is going to have to make a profit in the range of 10-12% at least on this $2000 investment.
As far as the global nature of the internet goes, right now North Americans are SLIGHTLY more than 1/2 of the people on the internet. Projections are that this will reverse next year, and eventually the proportion of Americans on the internet will parallel the proportion of the world economic activity - about 22%.
A lot of people talk about the internet as a 30 year old phenomena. But the fact of the matter is that for most of this time the internet was a defense project accessable only to research scientists at well funded universities. The internet as a world-wide web accessable to anyone with the scratch to pay for an ISP has only been around for about 5 years.
People talk about internet time. And overvalued stocks. And draw parallels to the roaring 20's. Well, I do not think this is a good parallel.
There are other times in American history where the stock market grew at a rapid pace. Without a following bust. In the very early part of the 20th century there was a boom in the stock market occasioned by another technological invention. The automobile. There were some 300 automobile manufacturers in the US, and many had crazy stock valuations. Most failed. But those that succeeded made some people very rich.... And then there was the 50's and 60's. All the technologies that had been held back by World War II came onto the market. Companies that took advantage of technologies like television again made some people very wealthy indeed. Ther other examples - railroads is one that comes to mind immediately.
7) Company starts to 'downsize' and 'lay off' worker to 'increase' efficientcy.. in order to drive the stock price and profits UP. So.. in the end, peoples greed for a 'better' return on investment caused them to get laid off in the first place.
The flaw in your reasoning is that any company that does not operate efficiently gets run out of business by those that do, resulting in no profits, no employees and zero stock value for the investors.
Companies cannot be charities or welfare agencies.
I just don't see it. I just don't understand the growth projections being as high as they are.
The people making these projections weren't born yesterday. It is well realized that growth follows an S curve. And it is NOT about company web sites that are merely store fronts. Or ordering books. It's about the fact that consumer use of the internet is now less than 1% every rational estimate of the final equilibrium state, and business use in MUCH LESS than 1%. And that is in the US. The internet is global, and the penetration in countries other than the US is far less. US internet companies are in a strong position to gain a disproportionate share of the value of the GLOBAL process.
Do you realize that in any manufacturing company in the US, G&A counts for something like 30% of the cost of production? And what is this G&A? It's accounting, accounts receivable, payroll, and innumerable other tasks where people STILL handle and pass pieces of paper around! It costs most companies between $50 to $100 to handle each and every purchase order and requisition. There is NO NEED for this.
Ditto the stuff you get in the mail every month. In the US something like 40% of the cost of your long distance phone service is the cost to send your bill, and process the check that you send back in the mail.
The internet has JUST STARTED making an impact, and it is already affecting the entire US economy.
The impact potential is in the HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER YEAR just in the US. World wide it is probably more than a trillion per year.
Companies like AT&T are not spending $2000 per house that their cable goes by just for internet shopping. It's about telephone + videophone + interactive video + all sorts of ecommerce + telecommuting + banking +...
The projections are based on:
1. Existing growth rates.
2. Amount of capital being invested in infrastructure to feedd future growth.
3. Existing penetration into the world economy.
4. Potential economic efficiency improvements. .
5. The immense synergy that is finally available because nearly everyone is being connected. While internetworking isn't new, the universality connectivity is very new. I am sure the you know as well as I do that the potential value of a network is of order N^N.
I think VALinux is Proof that the tech sector is overvalued by people not close to the tech
I am sure that there are any number of stocks that are overvalued. VALinux is probably one of them - along with RedHat and Corel AOL and Amazon. However many of these, like VALinux are not internet stocks.
The point that I am making is that there are a lot of very careful thinkers who believe that the internet sector AS A WHOLE is NOT overvalued. It is not a matter of engineering; I personally think engineers are not in a position to judge the economic impact of what is happening. They are looking at the implementation, not the social and economic impact of the implementation.
the last thing Mr. Greenspan is ever going to do is come out and say that one of the largest areas of the stock market is just so much vapor--because that would send everyone racing to sell their stock and ditch all tech investments, which would kill that sector of the economy.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that Mr. Greenspan has in fact done exactly this on more than one occasion. Remember the 'irrational exuberance' speech? Mr. Greenspan is a firm believer in correcting problems as soon as possible. If he felt that the internet 'bubble' was indeed a severe problem he would come out and say so in hopes of catching things before they turned into a bigger problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have chosen Alan Greenspan as Net Person of the Year. It's his economic policies that are making the investment of venture capital and the IPO funding of the net possible.
hoard Firewire. Net result: Manufacturers moved to USB.
While Firewire won't be used on mice and keyboards, it certainly IS a major success in the arena of video. Every digital camcorder in production now comes with Firewire. Sony and HP as well as Apple have Firewire on most of their PC's.
Firewire is also the standard interconnect for video in HDTV products - the only thing holding it back is the MPA's slowness to certify an encryption standard for these data streams.
Intel wishes Firewire would go away because they dont control it like they do with USB. The problem is that it isn't going away, and USB can't do what Firewire does.
but how to do it in Beijing, Outer Mongolia, or Sudan.
They can do whatever they want in their own countries, but if they try to import their products to a country that recognizes copyrights, they have a problem.
I know a lot of people don't like the WTO, but one of the effects of the WTO is getting countries like China to recognize copyrights internally.
someone writes A2B.diff and releases package B, derived from your package A, under the GPL (assuming that your license permits this)
I think that the problem with this is that under copyright law the original author own the rights to derivative works. This may prevent the author of A2B from releasing B under the GPL because this author does not own the copyright to B.
Of course he can release the patch under GPL, and all that implies, but I don't think he can do anything witht he license of B.
Neither is the Red Cross, but you sure can take donations to them off your taxes.
Rather, in Canada, the "civil" side of the law is descended from Napoleonic law. And a good set of consistent standards they are; the 'Mericans can learn a thing or two from us.
Actually the only part of Canada's legal system that decended from Napoleonic Law is the state system in Quebec. Which is very similar to what is practiced in the State of Louisiana in the US.
For that matter, there must be SOME lawyers that would be willing to take on SUN or COREL both for a fraction of the damages and for the publicity they would get as a "defender of public software shamefully stolen".
Indeed. The loss by many large corporations to lawsuits brought under a variety of contingency agreements is in fact proof that large corporations are vulnerable, no matter how big and powerful they are. Johns-Manville and Dow Corning are bankrupt. Phillip-Morris is hurting. Union Carbide was decimated. Hooker Chemical no longer exists.
If somebody does violate the GPL, they ARE vulnerable.
The benefits of forcing everyone to expand their domain knowledge and have a better overview of the system far outweigh the communication and ramp-up obstacles.
In the real world, a programmer quits on the average of every sixteen months. If that individual "owns" lots of code that others are not
familiar with, the costs are enormous. It happens all the time.
Given that the average tenure is so short, teaching other people the code is still a waste of time because they too will be gone in 16 months.
When everyone is gone, what do you have? Code and the documentation. Except under Extreme Programming the code is built ad-hoc, and the documentation is non-existent.
In addition if you read Brooks, he had a rather different view of the programming process. It is very well known that GOOD programmers are as much as 1000 times more productive than average programmers. Brooks's methods were designed to take maximal advantage of the talent of the top programmer, rather than this pair-programming idea which seems to me designed to achieve least-common denominator code quality.
Rotating responsibilities is just one idea that has immense value outside of general XP practice.
I've worked in rotationg responsibility environments, in technical organizations outside the computer industry. Do you know what happens? Nobody is in a job long enough to become really proficient.
Did anyone actually take the time to look up the
/. failed to post) At these meetings Microsoft demanded shares of Priceline at below IPO prices. All of this is so reminiscent of other previous Microsoft activities it should raise the hackles of anyone in the high tech industry. Microsoft is just repeating what they did to Stac here, and deserves to get sued by Priceline.
patent before first running off at the mouth???
The only one I could find listed at IBM's Patent Server is this:
US5897620: Method and apparatus for the sale of airline-specified flight tickets.
IT IS NOT A PATENT ON REVERSE AUCTIONS
It is in fact a technology related patent for
processing certain kinds of airline ticket
purchases. As far as I know, this idea was actually an original invention by Priceline, and they deserve to get a patent on it.
Claim 1 reads:
1. A method comprising the steps of:
viewing, using a computer, special fare listing information for air travel to a specified destination location from a specified departure location within a specified time range, said special fare listing information excluding a specified departure time; transmitting, using a computer, a request to purchase a commitment for carriage corresponding to said special fare listing information; receiving a commitment for carriage, including an obligation by an airline to provide a seat on a flight, that satisfies said request but does not specify a departure time;
accepting said commitment for carriage; and receiving at a time subsequent to said accepting an identification of said departure time.
This patent is so narrow that anyone that is not just out there COPYING what other people are doing (like Microsoft often does) should be able to avoid it.
There have been other stories in the media about Microsoft attending venture capital meetings with Priceline and failing to reach a business agreement. (That I submitted and
All of this is so similar to the previous rapacious behaviour of Microsoft there is no way I can find fault with either the patent system of what Priceline is doing.
Discoveries, laws of nature, mathematical algorithms, methods of doing business and the like are not eligible for patent protection. What the hell's up with the USPTO anyway?
I don't know where you got that document, but it is obsolete. The USPTO has been granting business method patents for a while now.
Who is to say that someone else in India didn't have the same idea years ago, but had neither the means (money), or the way(communication) to "patent" their idea.
Let me try to express the idea of the basic principle of a patent as simply as possible.
A patent is a contract between the inventor and the government to give you exclusive rights for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an invention rather than keeping it secret.
Now suppose the great Maharaja Nimoji came up with the idea for One-Click Shopping in the year 300 B.C. but didn't let his court scribe write down the idea in the Great Scroll of Nifty Sanskrit Inventions because he didn't want the other Maharajas using the technology.
Nobody can use the idea as a basis for further development of technology BECAUSE IT WASN'T PUBLISHED. The idea of the patent is very specific - IT IS TO ENCOURAGE THE PUBLICATION of technological ideas so that if the inventor croaks the idea won't be lost for 2295 years, like the M. Nimoji's invention of One-Click Shopping.
Nobody cares if One Click Shopping was invented but not recorded. It might as well not exist. The idea is to get people to release inventions to the public domain after some fixed period of exclusive rights so that they DON'T get lost, and people can freely use them.
People in the OSS don't seem to get this at all, but Patents really were designed to encourage the OPENING OF TECHNOLOGY. A patented idea in fact becomes public domain or FREE after a period of time.
The fundamental problem with patenting information is that you cannot exclude other people from having the same (or similar ideas) independently.
Your point being? People always give credit for inventions to the first person to develop the idea. Hell, I had the idea (quite independently) for the complex number plane when I was a 5th grader. Is it called the Eric Surface now? NooooOOOOOooo. Some other dude came up with the idea a few hundred years earlier.
And by the way, Metcalf's law is a crock, and a gross underestimate of the truth. Network connectivity scales O(N^N); thus the EXPONENTIAL (NOT O^2 or parabolic) growth of the internet. If we were doing (O^2) growth, we'd still be less than a million hosts.
If you want to argue that patent law should not be applied to (genomes, business models, software) fine. But leave all this other poorly thought out booshwaw behind.
BZZZZZRRRRRT.
The US Government is immune from Patent Infringement.
Maybe thos congresscritters aren't as stupid as you think..
Rotating programmers throughout a project?? Not only is that going to lead to unmaintainable code, but you'll have programmers working in areas that they know nothing about.
Rotating programmers is also very inefficient from a manpower useage point of view. Remember Brook's Mythical Man-Month? As you add people to a task, individual productivity decreases because of communications and learning time. It can get to the point where as you add people to a project, the entire project cycle lengthens.
Each time you rotate a programmer you are going to lose the time he takes coming up to speed. He is also likely to make a lot of mistakes during this period.
Or you could spend $23.50 at bookpool. For $2.50 it's worth tweaking Amazon. Depending on your shipping, you might come out even.
If someone gives you a book as a gift, and you later sell it to a used-bookstore, why should the original gift giver care?
I think most people would be offended by someone selling their gifts.
That assumes prior art considerations count. However, in the real world of current patent practice, it's not going to stop a competitor from obtaining a patent on your technique.
Think about what you said. The reason you can't get a patent on something that is already patented is because the original patent is PRIOR ART. If the patent office is ignoring prior art, patents don't prevent the competitor from getting a patent any more than a publication does.
Also worth nothing that the BSD license allows them to take it proprietary, whereas with Linux it would have to stay opensource.
Since this is in fact a proprietary product it is obvious why BSD was selected. It was all about the license.
Personally I don't like the idea of a company taking code I write, and then selling it without me getting a piece of the action.
By the way, does anyone have mirror of the article? Daemon News is slashdotted.
That is 24% PER QUARTER. That is an TERRIFIC growth rate. Most companies do well to get 15% per year. Dell, one of the fastest growing companies I ever heard of has been growing at 50%/year in the past.
Nope. You don't need to patent it. All you have to do is publish the technology somewhere. In the sciences there is even a journal of anonymous submissions so you don't have to disclose the company/author just for that purpose.
The patent MIGHT be good for cross-licensing, but that is about it.
Odd... it seems to me that every time I turn around, Hubble has broken again... are we attacking the symptoms here or the disease, so to speak?
You might want to learn a little more about the Hubble mission. When this thing was put together, several servicing missions were anticipated to replace components as the wore out, and to upgrade or swap out instruments. These missions are planned on a three year cycle.
The ORIGINAL plan was to bring the Hubble back to earth for refitting every 5 years, however the ability of shuttle crews to do in-orbit servicing has made this unnecessary.
IN FACT, the Hubble has been one of the greatest successes of the entire space program.
This mission not only includes replacement of gyroscopes (that lasted longer than originally planned), but upgrading some instruments and the main Hubble computer system.
While Moore's law is an empirical observation, Metcalf's law is not. It is a mathematical law that the connectivity of a network is in fact O(N^N). These connections are the generators of value on the net.
Now perhaps someone will try to restrict access for political reasons. The Chinese certainly already have. But the Chinese are having to back away from their access restrictions because the economic consequences of these restrictions are so severe. There is an empirical law about the internet routing itself around such restrictions which I think will in the long run hold true.
One person here commented on using the Hobbes timeline. I found it very interesting that none of the curves shown there had inflection points (second derivatives = 0); that is growth of the internet is still accelerating.
Take the $2000 and extrapolate that over the life of the twisted pair phone network in the USA and it's a trivial investment.
Corporate capital investments are not made this way. AT&T could put this money in the bank and get 8% or so. It is having to borrow a considerable amount of capital to make some of these acquisitions at 8%. In order for this to be profitable an/or be worth the risk of the investment, AT&T is going to have to make a profit in the range of 10-12% at least on this $2000 investment.
As far as the global nature of the internet goes, right now North Americans are SLIGHTLY more than 1/2 of the people on the internet. Projections are that this will reverse next year, and eventually the proportion of Americans on the internet will parallel the proportion of the world economic activity - about 22%.
A lot of people talk about the internet as a 30 year old phenomena. But the fact of the matter is that for most of this time the internet was a defense project accessable only to research scientists at well funded universities. The internet as a world-wide web accessable to anyone with the scratch to pay for an ISP has only been around for about 5 years.
People talk about internet time. And overvalued stocks. And draw parallels to the roaring 20's. Well, I do not think this is a good parallel.
There are other times in American history where the stock market grew at a rapid pace. Without a following bust. In the very early part of the 20th century there was a boom in the stock market occasioned by another technological invention. The automobile. There were some 300 automobile manufacturers in the US, and many had crazy stock valuations. Most failed. But those that succeeded made some people very rich.... And then there was the 50's and 60's. All the technologies that had been held back by World War II came onto the market. Companies that took advantage of technologies like television again made some people very wealthy indeed. Ther other examples - railroads is one that comes to mind immediately.
7) Company starts to 'downsize' and 'lay off' worker to 'increase' efficientcy.. in order to drive the stock price and profits UP. So.. in the end, peoples greed for a 'better' return on investment caused them to get laid off in the first place.
The flaw in your reasoning is that any company that does not operate efficiently gets run out of business by those that do, resulting in no profits, no employees and zero stock value for the investors.
Companies cannot be charities or welfare agencies.
I just don't see it. I just don't understand the growth projections being as high as they are.
...
The people making these projections weren't born yesterday. It is well realized that growth follows an S curve. And it is NOT about company web sites that are merely store fronts. Or ordering books. It's about the fact that consumer use of the internet is now less than 1% every rational estimate of the final equilibrium state, and business use in MUCH LESS than 1%. And that is in the US. The internet is global, and the penetration in countries other than the US is far less. US internet companies are in a strong position to gain a disproportionate share of the value of the GLOBAL process.
Do you realize that in any manufacturing company in the US, G&A counts for something like 30% of the cost of production? And what is this G&A? It's accounting, accounts receivable, payroll, and innumerable other tasks where people STILL handle and pass pieces of paper around! It costs most companies between $50 to $100 to handle each and every purchase order and requisition. There is NO NEED for this.
Ditto the stuff you get in the mail every month. In the US something like 40% of the cost of your long distance phone service is the cost to send your bill, and process the check that you send back in the mail.
The internet has JUST STARTED making an impact, and it is already affecting the entire US economy.
The impact potential is in the HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER YEAR just in the US. World wide it is probably more than a trillion per year.
Companies like AT&T are not spending $2000 per house that their cable goes by just for internet shopping. It's about telephone + videophone + interactive video + all sorts of ecommerce + telecommuting + banking +
The projections are based on:
1. Existing growth rates.
2. Amount of capital being invested in infrastructure to feedd future growth.
3. Existing penetration into the world economy.
4. Potential economic efficiency improvements. .
5. The immense synergy that is finally available because nearly everyone is being connected. While internetworking isn't new, the universality connectivity is very new. I am sure the you know as well as I do that the potential value of a network is of order N^N.
I think VALinux is Proof that the tech sector is overvalued by people not close to the tech
I am sure that there are any number of stocks that are overvalued. VALinux is probably one of them - along with RedHat and Corel AOL and Amazon. However many of these, like VALinux are not internet stocks.
The point that I am making is that there are a lot of very careful thinkers who believe that the internet sector AS A WHOLE is NOT overvalued. It is not a matter of engineering; I personally think engineers are not in a position to judge the economic impact of what is happening. They are looking at the implementation, not the social and economic impact of the implementation.
the last thing Mr. Greenspan is ever going to do is come out and say that one of the largest areas of the stock market is just so much vapor--because that would send everyone racing to sell their stock and ditch all tech investments, which would kill that sector of the economy.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that Mr. Greenspan has in fact done exactly this on more than one occasion. Remember the 'irrational exuberance' speech? Mr. Greenspan is a firm believer in correcting problems as soon as possible. If he felt that the internet 'bubble' was indeed a severe problem he would come out and say so in hopes of catching things before they turned into a bigger problem.