[e2e] end of interest

[Fred Baker]

On Apr 19, 2008, at 4:12 PM, John Day wrote:

> I might remind our readers that in 1970 none of us were worried  
> about whether or not AT&T would use what we were doing.   
> Admittedly, we were being paid for our trouble, but most of us were  
> just interested in what would happen and what we would learn from  
> it.  There is something amiss here.

Thanks for saying that. I have been very disturbed by this thread.

Cisco, my employer, and specifically the department I work in, funds  
a fair bit of research into making things better. Reason: at the end  
of the day, if things work better, people will buy more of our  
products. Call that whatever you like; it is the fundamental  
motivation of any Major Company to fund research. Now, if we're not  
going to make things better, why fund the research?

If your research isn't funded by a major company, then presumably you  
hope that the outcome will be something different that Major Company  
might have chosen. I came up the corporate side, not the research  
side, but at the end of the day the success of whatever company I  
worked for at the time depended on the notion that whoever was the  
"Major Company" at the time was wrong. So far, I have been mostly right.

If your research was funded by a Major Company, then you are betting  
that improvements to the present model are a good thing.  
Paradoxically perhaps, thus far the things we have learned on this  
axis have been useful as well.

I'm seriously wondering where the bitter folks who hate the  
businesses that made the Internet a worldwide communication  
infrastructure are coming from. Do they hate the Internet? Would they  
rather have an Internet that was undeployed for lack of funding, and  
therefore the system they the say they dislike because it is the last  
viable business standing?