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Hoov's Musings (volume 3, number 10) |
Unveiling
The Killer App
Mark Hoover,
President, Acuitive, Inc.
As I write this
Musing, we’re about halfway through the fall Next Generation
Networks (NGN) conference. For
the past few days, I’ve been surrounded by some of the brightest
lights in the industry, representing service providers, equipment
vendors, semiconductor vendors, consultants, venture capitalists,
industry analysts, and of course, the usual collection of groupies
and hangers-on who follow such collections of talent around.
I guess that’s where I come in.
Several things
have struck me as I have participated in this conference.
My observations here will probably fuel the next few Musings,
at least until my short term memory fails me and I can no longer
draw on my observations at NGN as a basis for a Musing.
Come to think of it, maybe this is my only shot.
So I’ll talk about the main thing that struck me here.
At NGN, I heard a
lot of people talk about the search for the “killer
application.” I heard
this in context to mobile wireless technology, metropolitan area
networks, subscriber management, and several other technology areas.
Often, the subtext was that these areas would not develop
unless Killer Applications were identified that justified their
existence.
While I believe in
the importance of the Killer App, I think that sometimes many in the
networking industry are standing too close to the parasite on the
slug on the bark on the tree to recognize the forest.
My observation over the last twenty years is that networking
IS the Killer App. Let
me be more specific here – connectivity is the Killer App.
Connectivity begat e-mail and the Worldwide Web which in
combination have changed the world. People always find a way to usefully and cleverly
leverage increased connectivity, often in ways one could not have
possibly imagined while creating the enabling connectivity. So if
you have an idea that will increase connectivity you don’t need to
look for the Killer App, because you are the Killer App.
Connectivity is so
highly valued, it doesn’t even have to be great connectivity to
gain critical mass and spawn a huge industry.
It just needs to achieve critical mass at the right time.
Please don’t tell Ken Kutzler I said this, but Token Ring
was a better technology than Ethernet.
But Ethernet (as deployed via 10BASE-T) was good enough to
achieve what people wanted from a Layer 2 technology – cheap and
pervasive connectivity – the Killer App for LANs. Equivalently, one could argue that DECnet was a more flexible
protocol than IP due to its dynamic addressing schemes; NetWare was
better than IP because it enabled auto-registration of networked
services; OSI was better than IP because it adopted every complex
and mind-bending protocol trick that a whole generation of
networking PhDs could conjure up; but in the end IP won out because
it was good enough and pervasive enough to meet the connectivity
demands of the world, and IP networking has become the cornerstone
of the networking industry. Cisco
didn’t need to look for the Killer App, because they were the
Killer App.
One thing I’ve
noticed is that once the critical mass connectivity technology is
established, the applications tend to evolve and morph to mitigate
the limitations of the connectivity technology – not the other way
around. In other
worlds, if you build it (cheaply and ubiquitously), they (the app
developers) will come.
The best example
of connectivity as a Killer App right now is wireless technology to
enable mobile access to IP networks, i.e., the mobile Internet. The
truth, which came out of the meetings at NGN, but which I and most
of the world already knew, is that the technologies being worked on
to make mobile internet connectivity available in a broad (read standards
based) and cost effective fashion, i.e. GPRS and 3G are going
to be painfully slow. Even
with 3G, you are talking about dial-up kinds of speeds on a per
active user basis, while the wired world is going well beyond that
into broadband. So,
contrary to a lot of the discussions out there, for the next decade
or so we are probably not talking about watching movies on our PDAs,
browsing the web from our cell phones, video-conferencing via our
laptops from the back of a taxi in Hong Kong, or listening to
Phillies games live while scuba diving in Bora Bora.
Yet, the market
for infrastructure equipment to allow mobile connectivity to the
Internet will be huge, just because this represents a new form of
connectivity that we haven’t had before and the lust for
connectivity is infinite. Over
time, users will adjust their habits to use the mobile connectivity
in ways suitable to them. What
will result is not connectivity like we get from our office or home
PC, but a different kind of connectivity – in some ways better (untethered),
in some ways worse (slow). A
follow-on industry will develop, not to develop the Killer App, but
to adjust applications to run adequately over the mobile
connectivity standard and to develop the Killer GUI; to optimize the
usability of this Killer new form of connectivity for a set of users
who type with their two thumbs, drive and walk around with an
earpiece in their ear, can read a small screen out of the corner of
their eye, and who desire access to a subset of the information
available from the world’s shared database (the Internet),
selected by their locality and presented to them in a manner
appropriate to the nature of the connectivity.
Lots of money will be invested in the attempt to deliver the
Killer GUI, and there will be some winners and many losers, but
those working at the infrastructure and device level will be largely
buffered from such dynamics because they are fundamentally
delivering the Killer App – low cost mobile connectivity.
Another example of connectivity as a Killer App, which will result in a hotter-than-hot industry segment, is the concept of Storage Area Networks and its cousin, Network-Attached Storage. It may not be obvious at first glance that these imbue connectivity value propositions, but I think they do. It’s about giving users broader access to more and more content and data, stored in bigger and more cost efficient clusters, deployed (relatively) randomly across the world (leveraging the already-in-place Killer App – networking). So if I were working in the SAN/NAS space, I wouldn’t be too worried about identifying the Killer App that will make it successful – I are it.
The next best
value proposition, and the only thing close in value to connectivity
itself, is faster connectivity. Sometimes faster connectivity it is oriented toward
removing bottlenecks (core optical transmission and switching,
Internet Traffic Management, core routers, next generation metro
area solutions), and sometimes it is oriented towards opening up the
floodgates for higher speed connectivity (e.g. DSL, cable modems,
broadband fixed wireless). But in either case, never bet against bigger/better/faster.
People will always find ways to leverage speed as well as
connectivity. From a
network equipment vendor or semiconductor company point of view, the
only thing that can trip up a bigger/better/faster value proposition
is competition – someone else doing it even better or sooner.
So again, in this case, bigger/better/faster is the Killer
App in and of itself. Success
is purely an execution issue.
As a sweat capitalist company that has to consider many opportunities on a daily basis, we always look for opportunities that are Killer Apps in and of themselves. In networking, that is either something that expands or speeds up connectivity, or is the vertical Killer App itself. In either case, you are the master of your own destiny. Anything else is a “tweener” that involves much higher risk. If someone comes to us with an idea for which identification of the Killer App developed by others is a big issue, that’s a huge red flag for me. It means that something has to happen that is largely out of this company’s control in order for the company to succeed. It may happen, there are plenty of examples of companies that have walked this tightrope and succeeded, but it may not, in spite of the best efforts of Acuitive and our client. Who needs that kind of uncertainty?
(volume
3,
number 10)
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