Methodological Toolbox (cont)

Robert Metcalfe’s magic quadrant

When it comes to the marketing of networks, Metcalfe’s magic quadrant springs to mind. Metcalfe has described a law for the development of networks, which can almost be held as universal. As Jerome Delacroix puts it : ‘[….] the usefulness of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes that are connected. Let’s take telephones as an example. Starting with two users, there is a network, but it’s not very useful. Once most residents in a city are connected, the usefulness of the network grows larger in proportion. Today, virtually all people living in the developed world are connected, so that the telephone network has created a “global village”[80] ’.

However simplistic, this law is very useful to those who wish to launch new network-related services. Indeed, when the network (or any form of network) is at the centre of a newly launched service, looking for short term revenues before network access is made pervasive does not make sense. This is why the marketing of network-centric products/services almost always involves an extensive investment phase dedicated to infrastructure. Infrastructure investments are often very costly but they make it possible to build the network and its access points unless you wish to use an existing network – like the Internet; pervasive access to the Internet is what it makes it so successful for building new networked applications. To a certain extent, one may even say that, despite its poor security enforcement, the Internet is so successful because of this very pervasiveness and ubiquity.

Highly secure, but less accessible services will – most of the time – be more successful than highly secure, hardly accessible services. In other words, first comes access, then usage and lastly, security is enforced to preserve usage. The well-spread belief that security and protection are drivers to system usage is, in my mind, a bad idea. Looking at what happened in France in the 1980’s with the roll-out of the Minitel system is tale-telling. At that time, France Telecom was still a government-owned PTT and not the modern privatised service-provider we know today. FT decided back then to equip each and every household with a free Minitel terminal. The extraordinary life span (20 years) of this service made it an amazing cash-cow for the telecom operator generating humongous revenues[81].