Tuesday, February 04, 2003

Quote from Scott Shamp in a recent ZDNet article on wi-fi: "Companies were paying billions for the 3G spectrum space. And then along came Wi-Fi, which basically killed 3G," said Shamp of the University of Georgia. "The free, unregulated aspect of the Wi-Fi spectrum makes it greatly advantageous over 3G." We see this theme over and over, where the free and simple overcome the expensive and complex.  What is the nature of this pattern?  It's more than just people wanting to get something for nothing.  I believe it is more the nature of the human interaction with our reality.  For millenia, information has been free.  The only limit to what information we could get was what information we were exposed to. Today this is different.  Much of the information we need requires us to sacrifice resources (a.k.a. money) to acquire.  This goes against millions of years of hard-wired evolutionary behavior.  As the information society moves forward, this will become a constant conflict to determine what we should have to pay for vs. what instinctively seems should be free. 12:31:24 PM