When your hero forecasts your demise

In late 1995, just as the world was starting to come online, Dr. Robert Metcalfe prophesied that the early Internet infrastructure would soon implode under the strain of surging traffic.

“I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”

At EarthLink, and for all the others of us building Internet networks in those early years, this prediction was a big deal. Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet while at Xerox PARC in 1973 and was the eponym of Metcalfe’s Law¹. He was our idol, an engineering deity we owed everything to. So when he came out and declared this network which he helped pioneer wasn’t going to last, it sent shivers through the community and caused my customers and investors to ask if the sky was about to fall on all of us.

I wrote a respectful rebuttal. I believed that Metcalfe’s analysis failed to differentiate between isolated traffic jams and the health of the overall network (specifics vs generalities) and didn’t give credit to the incredible innovation boiling under the surface — an army of engineers and entrepreneurs inventing solutions to problems no one had ever tackled before.

Needless to say, Metcalfe turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Years later, in one of the classiest and most humble moves I’ve ever seen, he literally ate his words by printing out his essay and eating it. Not long after that, he joined EarthLink’s board of directors.

¹ Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. In other words, a network becomes more valuable exponentially as more and more people and machines connect to it.