If there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that the technically superior solution rarely takes home the prize. Instead, the concept of “good enough”—and sometimes even “just good enough”—almost always wins.
Commoditization is the inexorable law of our industry, and the history of Ethernet and its derivatives is the ultimate proof of that.
Just look at the graveyard of superior technologies. In the LAN network, Ethernet replaced the more robust Token Ring and FDDI. In the WAN network, the great promise of ATM eventually gave way to Ethernet-based services. Even in the wireless realm, 802.11 triumphed over HomeRF and the more technically advanced HIPERLAN. Today, we see storage networks running on Ethernet instead of the more reliable, but expensive, Fibre Channel. And the ‘last mile’? DSL is being replaced almost everywhere by FTTH, which is essentially nothing more than sending Ethernet packets through a fiber optic cable.
After thirty years of digging in the mud, the conclusion is simple: 802 always wins.
Or is this simply the ultimate practical interpretation of Bob Metcalfe’s law (you know, the founder of 3Com)? The value lies not in the technical perfection of the protocol, but purely in the sheer scale of the network.