Folks,
I'm working on a technical book about a new way in which corporations are
using the Web to achieve the holy grail, "enterprise application
integration", using a new family of technologies called "Web
Services". The book is targeted at working programmers, so it will mostly
be that sort of technical content.
But there is an idea floating around geekdom that the Web works (in the
sense that it scales 5B+ documents, something which no one really
expected) because of various purely technological ideas (most of which get
attributed, inaccurately, to Tim Berners-Lee). I want to engage this idea
in my book (for my own nefarious, leftie political reasons) and my
publisher is cool with me doing a bit of "politics of technology".
My suggestion will be that of at least *equal importance* to these
technical fixes (having mostly to do with the differences between version
1.0 and 1.1 of the HTTP protocol, for anyone who cares) is the massive
influx of investment dollars to beef up the infrastructure of the
Internet, most of which the Web benefited from. In other words, we can't
say for sure that the purely technical fixes "saved the Web" because they
happened in conjunction with massive investments in router, packet
switching, last-mile, server, and bandwidth technologies and
capacities. Thus, it's entirely possible that $$ saved the Web, rather
than purely technical changes.
So, getting to the point, I'm wondering whether folks hereabouts can point
me to solid research about the magnitude of this investment? I'd like to
back up my argument with some solid economic research into the question,
and I'm not really adept at ferreting that sort of thing out from a
library, being a humanities type.
Any pointers would be greatly appreciated and will merit a slot in my
acknowledgments section. :>
Thanks,
Kendall Clark
--
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard
Oh take me back to the start
--Coldplay, The Scientist
