The Imperial Empire of the Telcos? The Central Office as Deathstar? Very Funny, Bob....

摘要

Every year I trundle over to IDC's Directions Conference on trends in the IT industry. I've been doing that for the last four or five years and always enjoy hearing their top analysts talking about where they think the industry is headed. All those hockey-sticked CAGR' charts are all somehow vaguely reassuring in a highly statistical sort of way. My only gripe about IDC is that they have always been a bit too IT-centric and have tended to relegate networking to the nether regions where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. For years, they've depicted the entire networking industry as a rather pathetic looking slice in their rather monstrous all-encompassing IT pie charts. And the $700 billion telecom services industry didn't even register on their radar screen—not even data services. Neither for that matter did the Internet.