On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 05:58:09PM -0700, Doyle Saylor wrote: > Me, > Clay Shirky writes about the economics of what makes the web work. Has some > theories about various ideas floating around about the IT industry that are > a starting place to think about what works and doesn't work about Web > Services, etc.,. > > http://www.shirky.com/
Oops, but, but, Clay Shirky is a bit of a moron. (I worked on one of the books he pub'd as an editor, and I've edited a couple of his tech articles, so I think I can say this with some confidence). At any rate, I was looking for actual infrastructure investment numbers, not other people's theories about how or why the web works, or whatever. > http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/ Ah, this may be a good resource. Thanks. > You might clarify your thinking about that issue of theory versus hardware > in technology terms also. For example, historically for a lefty what is the > path toward programming? Writing. What about memory in computer? The > public libraries. Huh? You really lost me here. My question was way simpler than that. The fact that the Web scales to 5B+ documents is a surprise to computer scientists. One of the prevailing explanations is that HTTP got smarter (basically, it became more cachable by intermediaries and proxies) and that those technical changes (the changes aren't *theoretical* or "theory", and I didn't imply that) were the critical change which has let the Web scale to 5B+ documents. I think it's probably more likely that the Web scales because "we" spent a couple hundred billion dollars on telecoms infrastructure, new routing & packet switching technologies and capacities, etc. So I was hoping to find some research that quantifies the amount of salient investment during the relevant period. Sorry if I wasn't clear. Thanks, Kendall Clark
