Hands up those of you who say the internet is getting slower as millions of
people pour onto it each year. Wrong! In fact latest research indicates that
the internet is in fact speeding up. Nua, an Irish company that publish a
monthly update on Internet research, say that ping statistics (ping is a
command used to measure the average time it takes for data to travel from one
computer to another and back again) suggests that data is travelling over the
wires about 15% faster each year. This is despite the fact that traffic has
trebled annually for the past couple of years. How can this be possible?
Service providers and other companies providing the actual backbone of the
internet are building capacity faster than it can be used.
This points to an incredible characteristic of the internet. The ability to
grow organically or in simpler terms the ability to grow in a way similar to
how things grow in nature. Let me explain.
As no single company or government owns the entire internet, there is no
single source of responsibility for its infrastructure. As much as the big
players in the industry would love to say they dominate the internet, it may
be worthwhile for them to note that ownership involves more than simply
collecting the profits.
At the start of internet commercialisation a few years ago - many companies
climbed on the bandwagon and became internet service providers offering
connections to the internet. What they discovered was being a service provider
is a very capital intensive business. While it is easy to have 50 people
dialling into one server connected to the internet, problems escalate rather
quickly when you have to allow 20 000 people access across 10 cities. This is
the reason why many of the small ISP’s have dropped out of the market and
service providing has been left with large companies who have deep pockets to
support the growth over a number of years.
This is nothing new you say, pundits have been predicting the demise of the
small internet players ever since their were small internet players. There is
however a way for these companies to survive and that is very simply to limit
their growth. By limiting their growth the company can manage their resources
better, offer a better service and build customer loyalty for which customers
are prepared to pay. On the flip side, growing exponentially means offering
cut throat prices which lead to higher demand and more capital expenditure.
This in turn cuts into sorely needed profits and eventually can cause the
demise of the business. By throwing out the old paradigm thinking of -
exponential growth is good - companies can carve out a niche and operate very
successfully (and profitably) within their target market. Many smaller
companies have now realised this and are changing their businesses
accordingly.
So what about the organic growth of the internet? I believe that the internet,
without any central control or the checks and balances associated with a 20th
century management thinking, is going to demonstrate how business will work in
21st century. It’s success thus far is attributable to the manner in which it
has been able to grow organically. Integral to this process is interdependence
between the various companies and organisations playing a role in the
development of the internet.
The internet could be likened to a living organism in that while it is always
at risk of spinning out of control (cancer), it survives by adapting to the
new environment where it finds itself. At the moment we are at the stage where
the internet is still growing in a quantitative way. It is getting bigger
every day without much concern for what it contains. I believe that in the
future this quantitative growth will give way to qualitative growth where the
concern will not be how big the internet is, but rather what it consists of.
This can in a way be likened to the development of the human being. Our first
18 to 20 years are spent growing bigger and the rest of our life is spent
growing better. We don’t generally get much bigger after 20 but hopefully we
do get a bit smarter.
The way the internet works is probably foreign to many practitioners of modern
management thinking. The internet is part of new paradigm thinking and cannot
be controlled in the same way as a normal "organisation" where everything
needs to be measured and controlled. The fact that nobody really knows how
many people are on the internet is an excellent illustration of this point.
The success of the internet will depend on us being able to step back and deal
with issues as they arise rather than planning for every eventuality. Much
like nature needs to deal with problems as they occur we will have to have
faith that we can overcome the hurdles while the internet grows. I feel that
this is more important than researching all the possible things that can go
wrong. Exciting times lie ahead with great learning opportunities for the open
minded.