> Think back to the days when the OSI protocols were
expected to be the
> next big thing
No doubt the savvier members of the investment community will
remember those days, and the predictions of how much money
would be made/lost by those who did/didn't invest in OSI, and
will take that into account when they hear similar claims
(such as yours) about IPv6.
I can see the marketing slogans now: "IPv6, the OSI of the
21st Century!"
In my analogy, IPv4 is the analog of OSI, and IPv6 is the analog of the
1990's Internet Protocol. In the 1990's people could see that the
DECNET/IPX/Banyan/NetBIOS/LU6.2 was not workable in an internetworked
world. It was clear that we needed a common-denominator protocol to
interwork between them all. OSI and IP both targeted that space but OSI
lagged behind in implementation of tools and protocols. The analysts
missed this, and even believed that IP was lagging behind, because they
did not take open-source deployments into account.
In today's world, it is clear that IPv4 networks cannot grow beyond
three years from now, but IPv6 networks can grow. There is no competitor
to IPv6 other than the possibility of making IPv4 even more complex with
triple and quadruple NAT or some other weird stuff. The market impacts
of open source are now well known and carefully studied, so when someone
says that Linksys has no home gateway boxes, a savvy investment analyst
knows that they are leveraging Linux technology and since Linux fully
supports IPv6, Linksys can ramp up production very quickly if they are
motivated.
This time we know that there is a tipping point about to happen and this
time, the investment community knows a lot more about technology and how
a technology shift can turn up-and-comers into buggy-whip manufacturers.
Given the large percentage of VC funded businesses who tie their
business growth to the Internet (and often to its growth), I fully
expect them to start asking tough IPv6 questions before this year is
out.
--Michael Dillon
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