I can't remember where this bookmark came from, but it's worth a passing comment.
It's an interview with the CTO of AT&T, Hossein Eslambolchi. Once you get past the hagiograpy, there are really two things of note. First, AT&T are really proud of their ability to cut costs. Shrink your way to excellence! A standard part of today's telco repertoire.
More interestingly, he hints that they see value in future in creating a "secure" network:
Mr. Eslambolchi is also pushing engineers in Bell Labs to develop software for computer firewalls and security systems that detect viruses days before they attack a corporate client's servers.
In other words, they add value by throwing packets away. According to the Freedom to Connect conference agenda (my emphasis added):
Freedom to Connect begins with two assumptions. First, if some connectivity is good, then more connectivity is better. Second, if a connection that does one thing is good, then a connection that can do many things is better.
Whilst this appears to be self-obvious, and I would hope this is true, I'm uncertain as to whether we have such evidence. As I have mused on previous occasions, it is possible that there is a Paradox of the Paradox of the Best Network, and that value does not always increase with more pervasive and frequent connectivitiy possibilities.
My only hope is AT&T's "dumb for packets, smart for antipackets" network will preserve the end-to-end principle by allowing end users to opt out of any and all filtering. Some chance!
The second assumption is also not a slam-dunk, as described in the Good Experience blog:
Barry Schwartz is the author of "The Paradox of Choice," an
outstanding book just released in paperback [...]
He spoke with me about the paradox of choice and how it affects the customer experience.
Q - What is the "paradox of choice"?
Everyone agrees that having choice is better than not having choice. It seems evident that if choice is good, then more choice is better. The paradox is that this "obvious" truth isn't true. It turns out that a point can be reached where, with more choice, people are worse off.
People can't ignore options - they have to pay attention to them. If they make a choice, is there another choice would have been better? There's more effort put into making decisions, and less in enjoying them. What's nagging is the possibility that, if they had chosen differently, they could have gotten something better.
The existence of RFCs etc. to define standards that are hard to deviate from helps to collapse choice. The user may have many email clients and servers to choose from, but only one email system. So the flexibity of the network and an "excess" of choice get eliminated by natural mechanisms. But there isn't any inevitibility to this process, and you wonder what markets and communications tools have failed to achieve mass adoption simply because of an inability to congregate around a smaller set of user choices.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:05 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/382