Wharton Ch. 3 - Enlightenment

This chapter really threw me for a loop, and brought me to an enlightenment about emerging technologies. What we sometimes view as a revolutionary technology is not revolutionary at all, but rather evolutionary. Focusing heavily on the examples of xerography, wireless radio transmission, and the Internet, this chapter sought out to explain that a manager of an existing firm need not create the wheel, but rather recognize other application domains that wheel could serve. So often a technology is developed for a sole focused purpose, and it is not until that technology is taken out of it's zone of development is it's true potential realized. For example, the Internet was developed decades before it changed the world. ARPA was developed and used by the miliatry and was only heard of in military and academic circles. But once Netscape developed the first browser, this information transmission mechanism called the "Internet" became a technology of value to the masses. The first two chapters had sucha focus on what not to do in dealing with emerging technologies, this chapter was the first to start explaining what a firm should do. In reading about the Internet and it's roots, I thought of what I believe will be the next big high-speed revolution: Internet2 and the Dynamic Circuit Network. the IP protocol has allowed for vast data transfer all accross the world at relatively high speeds, but the way the packets tranverse the Internet so randomly, it has created a bottleneck to acheiving super high speed and ultra-reliability. Internet2 does not revolutionize the trasnfer of IP traffic at all. Rather it has evolved that technology to provide for a constant, contigeous high speed "Circuit" for the data packets to travel through. Much like the phone lines create a a circuit to circuit connection, IP will operate in the same way. As America and the world become more bandwidth-hungry and such an immense load is put on our routers to direct every packet of IP information, Internet2 will feed this transmission thirst to, in my opinion, move High Definition movies accross the Internet in real time, and a doctor coudl view real-time motion MRI scans from accross the world. The world runs on the Internet, and Internet2 is going to be the new freeway. To quote 3M's slogan, it didn't invent the INternet, it just makes it better.