Technology Futures

Cisco is the biggest network equipment company on the planet. They sell lots of the equipment that powers the Internet, and many of these boxes are called routers, which act as traffic lights for Internet data. Routers route, to coin a phrase. The boxes, often not very big, sit quietly in closets and data centers all over the world and look at every single data packet passing through the box and decide where to send it.

From a certain distance, Cisco looks like an equipment manufacturer, but in fact, their primary product is the software that makes those boxes work. Routers have a specialized network operating system, and much of Cisco's income is derived from maintenance contracts that provide for upgrades, not to the equipment, but to the software installed in the equipment.

Open source routers have been around for a while; a cheap PC is used as the hardware platform. But the open source router software has typically been limited in utility and has required careful management. Lots of IT managers prefer the predictability and support that Cisco provides to trusting the company network to a loosely organized group of volunteer programmers.

But a new business, called Vyatta, has decided to take on Cisco by using open source router software. How do they plan to make money? By providing the same level of service and support Cisco does. But their R&D costs will be much lower because of the open source software they are using. It's a new business model, and it's where most software will head over the next decade.

In many cases, it simply does not make sense to spend money duplicating a piece of software to create a competitive product when in fact most customers are more interested in the service and support side. We will see more and more software companies providing outstanding service and support of free software.

By way of Slashdot, this article reports that CIOs at UK companies are up in arms about Google Desktop.

When someone uses the "search across computers" feature of Google Desktop, it copies files from the local computer to Google's servers--usually a breach of security for most companies, who don't want confidential files copied to servers outside the company. Google's popular desktop utility is being banned in many companies because of the security problem.

The broadband access providers (aka the telephone and cable companies) are shocked, just shocked, that their customers are actually using broadband.

Their response?

According to this article in The Register, the big companies are already installing software that slows down much of what people want to do, to the point of making them give up and/or buying the service from the access provider.

This article talks about Skype, the popular Voice over IP service, and how the cable companies are using software to slow down Skype calls, with the hope that their customers get fed up and buy VoIP from the broadband provider instead.

The two tier Internet is already well underway, and the only cure is to distribute ownership of the network among property owners (us), the community, and the broadband providers. By doing so, we get the ability to set some of the rules. If we simply give up and let the phone and cable companies recapture natural monopolies over broadband, they get to set the rules.

Communities that pursue distributed ownership of the network will become havens for business, because broadband services will be cheaper, better, and more plentiful.

AOL struggles mightily with spam email. It has millions of subscribers who receive hundreds of millions of spam emails per week. At enormous cost, AOL (and every other provider of email service) has to try to filter out this dreck.

A core problem is that the cost of sending email is very low. It's easy to buy a server that can pump out millions of emails per day, and the service providers have to receive that email and deliver it to their users. It uses a significant percentage of the available bandwidth on the Internet.

AOL has proposed charging a small fee to deliver email from bulk senders. This approach of charging for email has been around for a long time. If it cost, as an example, 1/100 of a cent to send an email, it would be a barely noticeable fee for most people, who send out just a few a day--if you sent 20 emails a day, it would cost you six cents a month for email. But if you were a spammer sending out a million emails, it would cost you $1000/million emails. All of sudden, sending spam costs real money. Spam would stop overnight.

But the problem is a bit more complex. Many nonprofit and civic organizations also send out lots of email, and AOL's current plan would not discriminate--senders of large amounts of email would have to pay. In return for payment, AOL would guarantee that an organization's email would get delivered to the recipient's mailbox (i.e. not get tossed in the spam bin).

But charging some for email delivery and not others would create a powerful incentive for AOL to put most resources into delivering the paid mail and correspondingly less into unpaid mail. So if you are sending a single (free) email to an AOL subscriber, it would get treated differently.

This is not a simple problem, and there are no obvious and simple solutions. But creating multiple classes of service on the Internet is likely to cause as many problems as it solves. It would be a difficult transition to go to fee-based email, but doing it across the board so that every email continues to get the same level of treatment would be better than AOL's proposal.