Chapter 45 Section 4 The Fate of Norwich Theorem

Dr. Peter Norwig, dean of Google Research Institute, said that when a company's market share exceeds 50%, don't expect to double its market share.This sentence is widely circulated in the information industry.This is a very simple truth, but it is often ignored by some company leaders.During the Internet bubble era, Sun Company occupied most of the workstation market, and its market value once exceeded 100 billion U.S. dollars.However, it is still blindly expanding and trying to further develop the market on workstations and servers. As a result, once the economy enters a trough, the workstation and server markets shrink rapidly. Even if it accounts for 100% of the market share, it will not help. More than 90% evaporated.

Cisco is now facing the same problem.Even if it captures the entire router market, it will have a hard time doubling the company's growth.Moreover, due to the effect of anti-Moore's theorem, its turnover cannot be increased proportionally by selling more equipment.Therefore, unless it can open up new markets, it will become the next Lucent.To get rid of the fate of Norwich Theorem, it is necessary to find a new market with the same scale as the original market or even larger. Cisco's helmsman, John Chambers, planned early.Cisco has invested heavily in VoIP (Voice on IP), that is, the business of using the Internet to make calls, including the acquisition of Linksys, which is quite famous in this field.At the same time, Cisco entered the storage equipment and services business, and also acquired some corresponding companies to support its VoIP strategy.In the past, in the telephone era, information communication in the world mainly relied on telephone lines, and the identifier of each person or family in that era was the telephone number.Of course, these telephone lines are not messed together, but connected through switches.In the Internet age, more information is disseminated through the Internet, as reflected in the previous comparison of voice communication and data communication.At this time, the representation of each person and family is an IP address. Of course, the network router has replaced the original position of the program-controlled switch.Cisco also replaced Lucent's position.In fact, since the bandwidth of the Internet far exceeds the bandwidth of the telephone network in the past, it is entirely possible to transmit voice through the Internet.In this way, the traditional telephone network is not needed in the world, and everything can be carried out through the Internet.Cisco has been using IP telephony for many years, but it will take time to popularize it all over the world.At the same time, there are some technical problems to be solved, such as the delay of calls traveling through the Internet, although this problem becomes less obvious as the network speed becomes faster and faster. Skype has already provided free global telephone services over the Internet, but there is still a big gap between Cisco and Cisco's real IP telephony that replaces traditional telephones. In order to ensure that a telephone voice data packet can be delivered to the other party in a timely manner, Skype will copy the packet and transmit it through multiple lines on the Internet. This overbearing method is actually very inefficient, even lower than the transmission efficiency of traditional telephone much lower.It's just that Skype abused the fact that the Internet is free, and actually made the telecommunications companies that laid the Internet pay for it in disguise.

Telephone calls can be uploaded on the Internet, and cable TV can also be broadcast on the Internet.In fact, many families have already used cable TV, and their lines can be used for making calls and surfing the Internet, of course, some modifications are required.This is more difficult commercially than technically, because the cables connected to the home are controlled by cable TV companies.But in any case, technically speaking, a high-speed cable line completely handles TV, telephone and Internet access, all of which are realized through technology similar to VoIP.Let us take a look at the vision that Cisco has designed for everyone.The Zhang family is a typical family of four. The son who is in high school wants to watch the football game at night, but the game has already started for half an hour when he returns home, but he still wants to watch it from the beginning.The daughter who is in elementary school wants to watch the cartoons introduced by her classmates today that will not be shown on TV recently, and the parents want to watch the Spielberg movies that they watched half of yesterday.These requirements were not possible before.It's all right now, my son set up the schedule of the game in front of the TV, and the TV station broadcast the football game for him on a half-hour-late schedule.My daughter searched for the cartoon in front of the TV, selected the play button on the remote control, and the cartoon she wanted to watch began to play on the TV.There were a few scary scenes in the middle, and she used the fast-forward function to jump over them. Before, she had to cover her eyes and wait for these scenes to pass.When my parents watched a movie, they started from where they watched halfway yesterday, and they received a phone call from a friend in the middle, and they stopped the movie for five minutes. Five minutes later, the TV station continued to play from where they left off.The Zhang family hasn't bought DVDs for a long time, because everything they want to watch is available on the Internet, and the video effect is exactly like that of a movie theater.When the Zhang family answered the phone, they did not use the current landline, but a Bluetooth headset through the home network router.After watching the movie, my daughter wanted to upload 100 10-million-pixel photos of her vacation on the Internet to share with her classmates. She only waited two minutes for the completion.This matter, I didn't have to think about it before, but now due to the rapid development of broadband Internet and the emergence of VoIP and similar technologies, it should become a reality within ten years.When the Internet speed of each family reaches 100 times that of the current DSL, that is, 100Mbps per second, then each family can watch three high-definition movies at the same time, each requires 25Mbps of bandwidth, and the remaining quarter is available For phone calls, browsing the Internet, playing games, uploading and downloading photos, etc.Since each family has its own IP, the media company can provide different programs for each family according to the IP.Due to the interactive nature of the Internet, users can control the playback of video programs by themselves. If you can’t finish watching a movie today, you can continue to watch it tomorrow. If you miss a piece of news, you can replay it.These programs do not need to be recorded and stored in one's own home, but placed on a network storage server.

In such a broadband Internet world, all communications are realized through X on IP.So what role will Cisco play in it?First of all, the demand for its existing products will continue to grow, and some of Cisco's products that are not yet in the market, such as network storage servers, will greatly increase the demand.Because to provide family entertainment services through Internet technology, the content of movies and TV must be stored on some local storage servers. In the field of VoIP and video transmission equipment on the network, Cisco is most likely to become the leader in this market, so that it can catch the wave of the broadband communication revolution after the Internet wave.In the longer term, if Cisco can follow the path of IBM, that is, continuously eliminate its low-profit low-end products, actively give up the market to Huawei and other "Made in China" companies, and conservatively develop growth points in new fields, it is possible To achieve longevity.Otherwise, if it insists on sticking to the existing market, it will be difficult to get rid of the fate of Norvig's theorem, and it will become the next Lucent.