23 ms·
Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time
by caseysoftware 4y ago
Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"?
Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system.
When I finally asked him, he looked at me and said "I made it up."
Me: .. what?
Him: I was selling network cards and I wanted people to buy more.
Me: .. what?
Him: If I could convince someone to buy 4 instead of 2, that was great. So I told them buying more made each of them more valuable.
It was mind blowing because so many other things were built on that "law" that began as a sales pitch. Lots of people have proven out "more nodes are more valuable" but that's where it started.
He also tells a story about declining a job with Steve Jobs to start 3Com and Steve later coming to his wedding. He also shared a scan of his original pitch deck for 3Com which was a set of transparencies because Powerpoint hadn't been invented yet. I think I kept a copy of it..
- caseysoftware 4y agoBtw, when I say "an active member of the Austin startup community" - I mean that seriously. Not only did he teach a class on startups at the University of Texas but regularly came to a coffee meetup for years, attended Startup Weekend demo time, came to Techstars Demo Day, and was generally present. I even got to do the Twilio 5 Minute Demo for one of his classes (circa 2012). It was always cool to have someone who shaped our industry just hanging out and chatting with people.
- mbajkowski 4y agoAbsolutely correct. Chatted with him several times circa 2015 to 2016 when working out of Capital Factory in Austin. He was present for all sorts of event such as mentor hours, startup pitches, etc. Funnily enough, he would give you a very stern look if he thought you were taking him for a ride. Have not been there recently as as much as I would like, but I imagine he is still around to be found.
- seehafer 4y agoHad a very similar experience hanging out with him and his equally-brilliant wife Robyn in ATX between 2011-2012. Very approachable guy -- impressively so, given his stature in the industry -- but could be quick with the "what the hell are you talking about?" look.
- passwordoops 4y agoHN comment of the year winner right here! Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing. If there's one thing I leaned doing a Ph.D. is if you dig deep enough, you find many foundational laws of nature rely on some necessary assumption that, if proven incorrect, would topple the whole thing
- toyg 4y agoCS "laws" like Metcalfe's are closer to Murphy's Law than Newton's...
- shuntress 4y ago"IF proven incorrect" is the important part. This "law" isn't somehow less true just because it was originally used as a sales tactic.
- oldgradstudent 4y agoHow would you even test such a vague law, let alone disproving it?
- btilly 4y agoThe law implies testable consequences, such as what the economic incentives should be from interconnecting networks. They are good enough that we should expect to see more drive to interconnect, and stronger barriers to entry for future networks, than history actually shows. https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf offers this and several other lines of evidence that the law is wrong, and O(n log(n)) is a more accurate scaling law.
- magic_hamster 4y agoIt's worth mentioning Moore's Law, which was actually a short term prediction, arguably turned into a business goal. The "law" states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits (like CPUs) will be doubled every two years (or 18 months by some variations). It wasn't entirely made up, as it was mostly based on advances in manufacturing technology, but it was a prediction made in 1965 that was supposed to hold for ten years. However reality kept up with this prediction for far longer than anticipated until the physical limits of silicon miniaturization became apparent in recent (ish) years, until the mid 00's (maybe later?).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 4y agoIt is quite telling that when Bob Metcalfe 'makes stuff up' he still hits it out of the park.
- stormfather 4y ago> But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse. - Bob Metcalfe
- riceart 4y agoA little confirmation bias on this one. In addition to the infamous internet will collapse prediction he was also pretty whole hog on the Segway scooter revolutionizing transit.
- jacquesm 4y agoSo let me enlighten you a bit: we did collapse the internet, and got a testy email from a bunch of backbone maintainers that they were going to block our live video streams (on port 2047) in four weeks time or so. Which resulted in us moving to the other side of the Atlantic to relieve the transatlantic cable. So even if it didn't make the news Metcalfe was 100% on the money on that particular prediction. The Segway never had a chance as far as I'm concerned but the other thing he got just so. But maybe he never knew (and I never knew about his bet).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- riceart 4y agoHe made a very specific prediction - it didn’t pan out - that there have been near misses and even global degradation events multiple times in the past 3 decades is not relevant. He admitted he was wrong and literally ate his words.
- chasd00 4y agoI remember trying to get NICs to work in Linux and the best advice was usually “just try the 3c509 driver”.
- xbar 4y agoPractically a mantra.
- bombcar 4y agoIt was well known when I started that you got a card that would work with that (and later for gigabit it was e1000).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xen2xen1 4y agoSimilar to "try the HP 4si driver" for printers?
- jabl 4y agoI remember when I bought my first fast ethernet card, there was some Linux HOWTO that discussed various ethernet NIC's, and crucially, their Linux drivers in excruciating detail. And the takeaway was that if you had a choice, pick either 3com 5xx(?) or Intel card. The 3com card was slightly cheaper at the local computer shop, so that's what I ended up with (595 Vortex, maybe?).
- IYasha 4y agoYeah, I had gold-plated 100Mb 3Com cards and they were the best. (something-905-series?) With full-duplex, hardware offloading, good drivers. I still have one lying somewhere. )
- hinkley 4y agoAs a poor college student I scavenged 3c509 cards to build a computer network in an apartment I shared with two other chronic internet users. That was right about the time someone has solved a bug with certain revisions of the card behaving differently. So suddenly the availability jumped considerably.
- ksajadi 4y agoLove the story, man!
- lr4444lr 4y agoI respect Metcalfe a lot, but halfway through undergraduate discrete math it was pretty obvious to most people in the class even before seeing a formal proof that a fully connected graph has O(n^2) edges. I just figured that people wowed by "Metcalfe's Law" were business types who didn't any formal theory into computing.
- oh_sigh 4y agoMetcalfe's law is about network impact or value, not about connections.
- asciii 4y agoWas it not specifically "compatibly communicating devices" or something and not users like how it was marketed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ivalm 4y agoYeah, but basically it’s a statement that value scales linearly with the number of pairwise connection.
- fsckboy 4y agobut it's a loose approximation so it's not good to overanalyze it. The number of pairwise connections grows as the number of pairwise connections, and connections ("how many people can you talk to") are valuable, so value grows. But individual connections to networks grow the pairwise connections by N, so that's even better. broadcast (one to many connections, like giving a speech to a crowd) is an efficiency hack, which is good, and efficiency hacks grow as the number of connections grow, so that's good too... ... is more how I think about what Metcalfe was talking about. Which aspects are x, which are x squared, which are log x is interesting, but that's not all bound up in his simple statment, despite his "as the square" wording. and Bob Metcalfe is personally a great guy in all the ways people are saying, but it's not soooo unique, that's the way a lot of tech types were as the mantle passed from the Greatest Generation to the Boomers (and what was that one in the middle, "lost" or "invisible" or something) I'm not suggesting we've lost that (we may have) just saying that's how it was, for instance as an undergrad you could walk into any professor's office and get serious attention.
- not2b 4y agoAlthough he made it up, there's an argument that the value goes up more than linearly. But as the network grows, every node doesn't necessarily need to talk to every other node except in rare circumstances, or they can reach each other through an intermediate point. So maybe O(n log n) would be closer.
- hinkley 4y agoI recall seeing an article a number of years ago that argued just that. That the network effect is nlogn. Still enough to help explain why large networks grow larger, but it also means that overcoming the incumbent is not the insurmountable wall it may seem to be. You may only need to work twice as hard to catch up, rather than orders of magnitude harder.
- btilly 4y agoNot only did he make it up, but it is false! Multiple lines of evidence point to a O(n log(n)) law instead. https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf has the details.
- NHQ 4y agoFrom the paper: > In general, connections are not used with the same intensity... so assigning equal value to them is not justified. This is the basic objection to Metcalfe’s Law... In my architectonic opinion, the perfect network comprises all nodes operating equally. Ergo the ideal is indeed Metcalfe's law, but architecture and design can be costly, which is simple the inefficient use of resources. These being very precise machines, anything less than 99.999% is amateur, ergo the law obtains.
- btilly 4y agoWe are talking about computer systems that connect a network of humans. Humans are notoriously imprecise and unreliable machines. Anything more than 0.00001% is therefore a miracle.
- NHQ 4y agoLol, networking people has produced little of real value except the paradigm itself, and social networking is little more than making humans more efficient at marketing to each other. Networking is for DATA. When people behave like networked machines... well that's global capital communism tbqh.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoAnd yet it's trivially true. Value accrues with connectivity, which is number of the edges in a fully connected graph being n(n-1)/2, which as n grows larger approximates to n^2. I would be surprised he said he "made it up", other than as a joke about elementary computer science.
- dwheeler 4y agoHe may have "made it up" to improve sales, but from a certain viewpoint it's correct. If decide to measure the "value" of a network based on the number of node connections, then the number of connections for n nodes is n(n-1)/2 = 0.5n^2 - 0.5n which is O(n^2). Of course, the value of something is hard to measure. Typically you measure value as "benefits - costs", and try to convert everything to a currency. E.g., see: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-benefitanalysis.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-benefitanalysis.as... . But there are often many unknowns, as well as intangible benefits and costs. That make that process - which seems rigorous at first - a lot harder to do in reality. So while he may have "made it up" on the spot, he had a deep understanding of networking, and I'm sure he knew that the number of connections is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. So I suspect his intuition grabbed a quick way to estimate value, using what he knew about connection growth. Sure, it's nowhere near as rigorous as "benefits - costs", but that is hard to really measure, and many decisions simply need adequate enough information to make a reasonable decision. In which case, he both "made it up" and made a claim that you can justify mathematically.
- pabs3 4y agoIf that copy still exists, having it on archive.org might be interesting.