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The Economist The big three-O

"The vast majority of the internet's traffic begins and ends its journey on Ethernet networks, which are found in nearly every office network and home broadband connection.

It was not supposed to be this way. Few imagined that this particular networking protocol would last as long as it has. Indeed, the landscape is littered with better-financed, better-backed rival protocols that failed against Ethernet. IBM's Token Ring system is one famous casualty. Asynchronous Transfer Mode, supported by the telephone industry, is another. So the case of Ethernet is worth examining: the reasons for its longevity may offer lessons to the information-technology industry."

The Boston Globe Ethernet inventor looks ahead
"For the first decade of the personal computer age, most machines worked in splendid isolation. People hadn't realized that PCs wouldn't fulfill their potential until they were bound together in networks. That was Metcalfe's point. When he began pushing the idea of networks, computer users shrugged. Why not just carry information by hand from machine to machine? Why bother with a maze of wires plugged into costly circuit boards?"

"Nearly unknown a couple of years ago, WiFi is now a $2 billion market, and it's just getting warmed up. These days nobody asks why we'd buy wireless ethernet gear, when good old Category 5 cables still work fine. We're considerably more open-minded about such things, thanks in part to Bob Metcalfe."

News.Com 30 years of Ethernet gains
"There are four business models out there today. The first is the vertical model exemplified in the 1980s by the IBM monopoly. The second, which dominates today, is the horizontal model dominated by AOL, Cisco, Intel and Microsoft. They are also monopolies, I might add. The third is the Linux/open-source business model. And the fourth is the Ethernet business model.

It's based on de jure standards with proprietary implementations of those de jure standards, and it is unlike open source in that competitors don't give their intellectual property away. The competition is fierce, but there is a market ethic that products will be interoperable. And the standard evolves rapidly based on market engagement in such a way to value the installed base. There is a heavy value placed on sustaining and maintaining the installed base. That's the Ethernet business model."

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“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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