Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

G. Gilder for many years had a reputation of the high-tech guru and the prophet of the "Internet Era". How justified is it? In fact he missed the Internet revolution altogether. Back in 1994, when the first Mosaic web browsers spread all over computer screens on campuses like a brush fire, he wrote and talked in his interviews and columns about the same things as now - increasing bandwidth, fiber optic lines, cable, interactive TV. Internet was occasionally mentioned in passing, Web - not at all. But isn't the Internet all about bandwidth and megabits per second? No, it would be like saying that the PC revolution of the early 80's was all about increasing number of transistors. Growing transistor count was one of the enabling driving forces. The revolution itself was radical shift in business models and organizational structures, huge leap in availability of computing power at the fingertips of much greater number of people. Similarly, the Internet revolution was not about more bits per second - it was a rapid and momentous transformation of the whole business of accessing and exchanging information by individuals and organizations all over the world. And G. Gilder largely missed it. To his credit, most of the other "gurus" missed it just as well. This is a pesky trait of true revolutions - to fool and confuse all pundits and pontificators gazing into their crystal balls. Mr. Gilder is also often cited for in-depth knowledge of scientific and technical aspects of the "telecosm". I have an impression this reputation comes mostly from journalists who themselves understand very little of these technical issues, or those who do understand but directly benefit from his relentless promotion of certain technology companies. To be sure, there is no shortage of technical jargon, precise quotes of wavelengths and megabits scattered all over the book, copious panegyrics to "erbium-doped amplifiers" and the likes. Nevertheless, reading the "Telecosm" I constantly had an uneasy feeling whether the author really understands in depth the scientific and technological matters he discusses, or hides his lack of solid grasp of these issues behind the mystical vagueness. Sometimes the mistakes are obvious, like quoting supposedly 40% change of light wavelength in Michelson-Morley experiment; it should be about million times less than that. There is a rambling description of the polar lights being "naturally occurring laser" (in fact it is a very different phenomenon), and many other examples. The book contains many stories about discoveries and development of various optical, laser or semiconductor technologies. Some of these stories are well-written and occasionally witty, but most can be found in other books and magazines; often they are incomplete and biased. For example, he includes a many pages long narrative about the invention of laser by Charles Towns, without even mentioning independent co-inventors Soviet scientists Basov and Prokhorov, who were co-recipient of the Nobel Prize with Towns for laser development. The central idea, constantly repeated throughout this book, is prediction of the "coming bandwidth abundance". G. Gilder's main argument is that each wave of technological innovation makes certain crucial and previously scarce ingredients so plentiful that the price goes virtually to zero and this radically changes the whole economic landscape. To some extent this is valid. But recall the promise of electricity from nuclear power that would be "too cheap to meter" - it didn't quite came true. Large increase in supply of these ingredients does not reduce their real cost close to zero. Most people still cringe at their electricity bills; a car with 180 h.p. V6 engine cost a couple of thousand dollars more than a similar one with a 120 h.p. 4-cylinder engine. Abundance changes numbers, but doesn't eliminate economic laws. Another often repeated idea is about the future dominance of "dumb networks, with intelligence shifted to network's edges". It may turn out that in some parts of a network the sheer amount of bandwidth will be more advantageous relative to sophisticated and expensive switching or routing functions. But it is doubtful that this principle will hold true for much of the future communication infrastructure. But instead of business or technological arguments Mr. Gilder attributes to this idea some kind of religious and mystical significance. There are also some scientifically sounding phrases such as "to have high-entropy content the network must have low entropy". I am still at loss to know which laws of math or physics this notion is based upon. Near the end of the book Mr. Gilder lists his "20 Laws of Telecosm". This chapter was probably the biggest disappointment. Among these 20 "laws" I haven't found a single one, which doesn't have very serious problems with consistency and credibility. Some of them vary from obvious to dubious ("Telecosm requires better and better directories...", "today's television is dead..."), but these are the least of the problems of these "Laws". Just a few examples: 2. "Gilder Law", stating that the amount of bandwidth doubles each 6 months, three times faster than the computing power. That's apples and oranges. Moore's Law tells about increasing power of a single chip; Gilder talks about cumulative increase of all bandwidth in the world, which is often of little relevance to majority of users stuck for many years with 56-Kb modems. 6-7. Shannon's Law and Corollary. "Bandwidth is the substitute for power. The future is in low-power broadband devices...". This is based on the simplified and erroneous understanding of the Shannon's Law (presumably he means Shannon's formulae C=B*log(1+S/N), where B is bandwidth, C is information transmission capacity, S/N is a signal-to-noise ratio). This is a misnomer. Shannon's Law was a foundation of the modern communication theory, but hardly the guidance for actual technologies, which must take into account error-correction, nonlinear "cross-talk" effects and many other factors. Real communication systems are designed to all allocated bandwidth, and transmit minimal amount of power sufficient to reduce error rate to acceptable levels, which Shannon's expression doesn't describe.