Ett tillägg om Metcalfes lag (nämnd i anteckningar 1 och 2); följande ur en artikel om Bob Metcalfe i Economist från 12 dec 2009:
When Dr Metcalfe started promoting Ethernet, one big problem was to convince people to adopt a networking technology that almost nobody else was using yet. Dr Metcalfe pointed out that each new user would increase the size of the market for Ethernet products, and that as more people adopted the standard, it would make more sense to be in the club—what is today called a ”network effect”. On a slide, he quantified a network’s value as roughly proportional to the square of its number of users. But it wasn’t until a dozen years later that George Gilder, a technology pundit, called this Metcalfe’s law.
Samt detta om att Metcalfes avsikt aldrig var att grundlägga en vetenskaplig lag:
Dr Metcalfe delights in a paper published in 2005 by two academics, Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilly, that presents a detailed refutation of his law. The authors argue that if the law were true, network operators would be merging left and right to achieve rapid growth in value. But such mergers do not in fact seem to create as much value as the law suggests.
”The law is not any amazing math,” Dr Metcalfe responds. ”It’s a vision thing. It’s vague. I said the value is approximately the square of the number of users.” And with Metcalfe’s law, as with so much else, the technology community is willing to cut him a bit of slack. ”Only geeks care about this stuff,” says Dr Cerf. The basic idea was right: bigger networks are more valuable. […]
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