Scott Bradner

It has long been a truism that the quality of technology too often has little to do with marketplace success. VHS vs. Betamax is the most commonly cited example.

I just got back from my first SuperComm show and must say that I was surprised. There were more exhibitors, fewer booth babes, more attendees and less noise than I expected.

Fellow Network World (U.S.) columnist Mark Gibbs likes pretty e-mail. But I hope that he won't send me pretty e-mail when he sees this column because he will get the letter back unread.

I just got back from my first SuperComm show and must say that I was surprised. There were more exhibitors, fewer booth babes, more attendees and less noise than I expected.

If there

We are told in just about every venue that the Internet needs all sorts of quality-of-service (QoS) mechanisms to make it useful. However, some recent real-world experiments seriously question whether this is true.

On Aug. 2, right above a story about a new and cheaper generic version of Prozac, The New York Times announced the Internet of tomorrow. If the prediction comes true, network managers may be glad Prozac will be getting very cheap in a few months. But, sorry Prozac makers, it will not come true.

Some of you might remember Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), but it