The Paradox of the Best Network
David Weinberger,
Feb 17, 2003
The principle supported in this short item is that "The best network is the hardest one to make money running." By "the best network" the authors mean an network that "delivers bits in the largest volumes at the fastest speeds," is open to innovation, and closes off the fewest futures. The paradox exists because as a network becomes better, individual components become stupider, and as components become stupider, connectivity becomes a commodity. Networks should not be optimized for specific services. As software engineers say, "Today's optimization is tomorrow's bottleneck." The services should live at the edge of the network, interacting through the network with each other, rather than defining features of the network.
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