Re: [ga] Internet stability

[Jefsey Morfin <jefsey@wanadoo.fr>]

Dear all,
As Joanna puts it in term of economics for this major failure:

On 05:40 01/12/01, Joanna Lane said:
>The consequences of foolish choices. ATT paid 6 billion dollars for Excite.
>http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200111/msg0038
>2.html>

But the real issue is well defined in that memo:

<quote>
I do know that ATT paid six billion dollars for Excite by itself on the 
assumption that people would leave their home pages set to Excite. This 
seemed particularly naive and foolish. It was compounded by ATT comments 
about wanting a share of the e-commerce revenue generated by their 
customers. This seems to be part of a fundamental misunderstanding of what 
the Internet is. I think of it as confusing the Internet with the Home 
Shopping Network and not recognizing the layering and the end-to-end 
architecture.
</unquote>

The problem is the usual problem of commercial people dreaming to reshape 
the network reality rather than using it. Any seaman knows that you go with 
the sea, not against. Before doing any business on the network it is better 
to understand how it works, and how the people use it :-) ...

The problem is that when you tell how the Internet is built you are not 
listened ... yet (so many people know intuitively better) . But it is 
coming with such failures. May be sometime the ICANN will listen too !

The Internet is neither a captive starn etwork, nor a meshed market. It is 
a distributed, open real life multi consensus you have to attract. Business 
on a network must be layered along the network layers: what costs and kills 
is the confusion between layers as with NSI: one thing is to register a 
domain name, another is to certify a user, another is to run DNS servers, 
another is to coopete with other TLDs to develop the Nets. Even if you 
address apparently the same market: actually you do not address 
individually the same people, not at the same time, not in the same 
capacity. Bundling things instead of helping people shopping for waht they 
want, when they want, how they want, costs you your shirt. Telcos have 
nothing to do with the Internet: they have to create a separate affiliate. 
And that affiliate has nothing to do with e-commerce. Another affiliate. In 
France France Telecom understood that: they created Wanadoo - a total new 
name and company, different people to approach the market. And they still 
commercially partly suffer from their Telco ties.

I only hope that this huge financial loss will not hurt Marilyn's since she 
is in that area, and that it will serve all the others who cannot afford to 
lose even 6 dollars to understand the architecture of their own small local 
or family business. I am glad I did not sign with Excite :-) for a project 
!!!

This is not the first time I see AT&T blundering in style: the collapse of 
the X-Ten project in the early 80's helped a lot of my by then X.25 public 
services customers not to go under or wrong - I had a worldwide famous :-) 
day over that in Tel Aviv for those who may remember !!! You may tell 
people what they do is against the network architecture rules: they do not 
listen, but when they see the financial losses some start understanding ....

Jefsey

>on 11/30/01 10:36 PM, Roeland Meyer at rmeyer@mhsc.com wrote:
>
> > As of midnight, tonight, 4 million users, just in the SF Bay Area, may lose
> > their internet connection due to the business failure of Excite @ home.
> >
> > Lately, we've been talking about what matters. Well, this is what 
> matters to
> > the Internet public. This has been seen coming for almost four months. Has
> > the ICANN even tried to do anything? Yet, ICANN claims to help 
> stabilize the
> > Internet. The territory that ICANN claims, doesn't touch any part of this.
> >
> > This may be the largest outage in the history of the Internet. Heretofore,
> > the NorthPoint failure may have had claim to that honor. However, unlike
> > NorthPoint, Excite has mostly residential customers. Ergo, the impact on
> > business isn't as great. DSL providers can expect many new customers as a
> > result, even if Excite doesn't pull the plug tonight.
> >
> > --
> > R O E L A N D  M J  M E Y E R
> > Managing Director
> > Morgan Hill Software Company
> > tel: +1 925 373 3954
> > cel: +1 925 352 3615
> > fax: +1 925 373 9781
> > http://www.mhsc.com

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