Found this link in /. about Dr. Odlyzko's work, in particular the paper, "Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation" found in his directory of Papers on Communications.
Slash-Dot gives this quote from the paper:
'... the networking industry [has] devoted inordinate efforts to technologies such as ATM and QoS, even though there was abundant evidence these were not going to succeed. One can go further and say that essentially all the major networking initiatives of the last decade, such as ATM, QoS, RSVP, multicasting, congestion pricing, active networks, and 3G, have turned out to be duds. Furthermore, they all failed not because the technical solutions that were developed were inadequate, but because they were not what users wanted.'
Interesting footnote for me is that CNRI released a series of monographs a while ago comparing the then emerging internet to a number of mature industries such as railroads, banking, and electric power utilities.
Posted by ghbrett at January 04, 2004 08:48 AM