Intelligence is fanning out to the edges of the network—machine intelligence on the Internet, but also human intelligence on the Web. In a connected world, distributed, peer-to-peer information-sharing constitutes a genuine paradigm shift that will leave old ways of doing business in the dust.

The “centralized authorities” of large corporations claim to “get it,” but the evidence suggests otherwise.

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Learn about Harbor’s brand-new study of Pervasive Internet adoption, Connecting to Your Future: The Networking of Every Manufactured Thing.  Download an overview of Connecting to Your Future (PDF, 328 KB).

Human “Smartness” Is Distributed Throughout the Network, Too
In the predictable barrage of commentary on Carly Fiorina’s dismissal last week as Chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, one piece stands out for an odd reason: it was written three years ago. We’re referring to the early call for Ms. Fiorina’s resignation by the editors of the now-defunct Red Herring magazine and Web site.

This week, that magazine’s blog-based successor, the AlwaysOn Network, reprinted Red Herring’s “then-infamous” open letter to Ms. Fiorina.

At the time, Red Herring’s editors vehemently opposed the merger of HP and Compaq. They recalled Ms. Fiorina’s prediction that she would make HP “a leader in the second phase of the Internet,” and they said in their letter:

...under your management, HP seems unlikely to be a leader in the second phase of the Internet—or anything else. For example, you tried to copy the corporate-services successes of IBM’s CEO, Lou Gerstner, by making a pass at PricewaterhouseCoopers, only to see the $17.5 billion merger fall apart. Good thing, too, because purchasing the consultancy could not have made HP another IBM.

And the Red Herring letter made these recommendations:

...if HP hopes to be a leader in the second phase of the Internet, it should invest more in research and development and seize new markets in wireless technologies, handheld devices, and the Internet infrastructure that would link such devices together. Your company’s best chance is to embrace its own engineering traditions.

A Glance Back at Our Own Past as Well
This all reminded us that we, too, had had a strong opinion about HP and Compaq. So we went back and looked it up.

The “intro” screen of the Harbor Web site, circa early 2002

Source: Harbor Research, Inc.

On September 13, 2001—four months before the Red Herring open letter—we published this “Harbor Perspective” (ancestor of the Currents newsletter you’re reading now):

When we learned of the recent HP/Compaq merger, an image entered our minds here at Harbor Research: the image of two dinosaurs mating in a vast wasteland.

The merger seems to be predicated upon a 1990 vision of the marketplace, which the partners now intend to implement by, say, 2005. In doing so, both companies mis-focus themselves on the past and miss the remarkable opportunity that is already upon us: a world profoundly transformed by the networked communication of billions of embedded micro-devices—the phenomenon that we at Harbor Research call “the Pervasive Internet.”

Furthermore, in pursuing this acquisition, HP seems to be ignoring its own roots and culture. From its distinguished origins in test equipment, HP has always been a speciality house that has never done well with general-purpose computing. But HP’s signature strengths enabled it to strike an organic home-run in printers, and the company has all the competencies to do the same thing in Pervasive.

Yet in this profoundly important area, HP seems only to want to mimic IBM, particularly in the services and consulting realm—a shame when HP possesses a vastly different, but equally valuable, set of assets and skills.

In fact, Pervasive roots run deep throughout HP history. Why should HP want to chase the skirt of a commodity business when there is so much more it could be doing creatively to seize one of the most profound opportunities of the digital information age?

Genuine Paradigm Shifts Happen Rarely and Always Provoke Disbelief
So, OK, “we were right, too,” though our perspective was explicitly focused on pervasive computing and device networking. Is that our only point today—that we were right? No, not at all.

Our point is that business leaders are not paying sufficient attention. “The second phase of the Internet” is indeed a crucial thing to become a leader in, but you can’t very well lead if you don’t understand what it is.

In 2001-2002, the leadership of HP—one of the most technologically fluent companies in the world—didn’t understand it. To put it bluntly, a legendary manufacturer of electronic devices had lived through the Internet revolution without coming to the conclusion that its famous devices might converge with that revolution.

That may seem unbelievable, but it’s nothing compared to this: Today, 3-4 years later, most titans of the Internet’s “first phase” still don’t understand the second phase.

At least in their public discussion and advertising, it’s still all about high-bandwidth, high-speed, human-oriented services like VoIP, digital movies streamed off Web servers, and multimedia entertainment delivered to the cell phone. They can’t get past the PC and the handset. They still think the Internet is the same thing as the World Wide Web, and they just can’t make the shift from the human-focused Web to the device-oriented Pervasive Internet.

Journalists and Tech Visionaries, But Not Industry “Leaders”?
What’s wrong with this picture? The IT titans don’t get it, and yet self-appointed (and formerly powerless) high-tech journalists with a blog do get it.

You can tell that the AlwaysOn Network gets it simply by the name they chose for themselves. Great name. For the next era of IT (which is another way of saying “the next phase of the Internet”), the salient characteristic of “broadband” connectivity (as opposed to dial-up) is not its speed or bandwidth at all, but rather the fact that it’s “always on.”

Harbor Research has been saying this for many years, too—well before January, 2002, when we happened to publish our white paper entitled “The ‘Always On’ Pervasive Internet” (PDF, 180 KB).

Always-on Internet connectivity makes possible a global digital nervous system of connected devices that runs autonomously, without human monitoring or intervention. And this in turn makes possible a new level of system automation and optimization—and thus a new level of data-driven services and relationships—that constitute that rare thing: a genuine paradigm shift.

Of course the savvy minds of the AlwaysOn Network (whose editor, Tony Perkins, by the way, co-founded Upside Magazine before he co-founded Red Herring) are not the only ones to get it.

MIT’s “Internet-Zero”
To cite only one other example, the category-free technological visionaries of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) are telling their own compelling version of the story. They call one of their latest initiatives “Internet-0” (Internet-Zero), in deliberate stark contrast to the high-speed “Internet-2” initiative.

Their point is that the future of the Internet lies in its past—that is, in a re-embrace of its origins. The unsung “next phase” of the Internet is not about more bandwidth and speed, but about new uses of the basic, beautifully designed principles of IP networking, which offer the best standard for enabling global device connectivity and interoperability.

CBA’s articulate leader, Neil Gershenfeld, along with two of his colleagues, Raffi Krikorian and Danny Cohen, published an article about Internet-0 in the October, 2004 issue of Scientific American, entitled “The Internet of Things”—a phrase that was the motto of MIT’s now-superceded Auto-ID Center, an academic / industry cosortium where the EPC™ (Electronic Product Code) standard was developed.

Their inspiring article contains, among other discussions, a lucid explanation of the physics beneath interoperable device networking over IP. If you missed it back in the fall, you should look for it now.

Download a printer-friendly PDF version of this essay (200 KB).
(See our terms of use.)

Learn about Harbor’s brand-new study of Pervasive Internet adoption, Connecting to Your Future: The Networking of Every Manufactured Thing.  Download an overview of Connecting to Your Future (PDF, 328 KB).

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Who We Are and What We Offer
New! Harbor Pervasive Internet Briefing Service
First, a few words about our latest offering, which is a unique and efficient way to harness the resources of Harbor Research: The Pervasive Internet Briefing Service. This annual package delivers outstanding business intelligence value by combining all points of contact to Harbor:

• Quarterly in-person briefings on subjects of your choosing


• All Harbor publications for a year


• Department- or business unit-wide access to Harbor SmartSphere® online tracking projects


• Phone and email access to analysts

Download a brochure on the Pervasive Internet Briefing Service (PDF, 500 KB).

Founded in 1983, Harbor Research Inc. has more than twenty years of experience in providing strategic consulting and research services that enable our clients to understand and capitalize on emergent and disruptive opportunities in high technology, Harbor Research’s clients are leaders in communications, computing, control, and content. Harbor Research has built extended relationships with larger multi-line companies including AT&T, ABB, General Electric, Danaher, Eaton, Emerson, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Hughes, IBM, Intel, Invensys, Lucent, Motorola, Rockwell, Siemens, and Texas Instruments, as well as with growth companies such as EMC, Cadence Design, Conexant, Qualcomm, and PTC.

We also work with a broad array of emergent start-ups and pre-IPO technology ventures. We have built relationships with a number of significant Pervasive Internet players, including Questra Corporation, Xsilogy, DataSweep, eDevice, Wireless Innovation, and emWare, to name a few.

We provide studies, workshops, briefings, research retainers, and consulting engagements of uniquely high value to both technology suppliers and adopters. For more information, please contact us.

Harbor’s new online platform for research services offers continually updated intelligence and stunning data-visualization.

Static, printed reports can’t track the complex ecosystems and warp-speed pace of high tech. SmartSphere® projects can.

The brains of the Web. The brawn of server databases. The beauty of a CD-ROM.
For nearly ten years, we’ve been waiting for Web media to get good enough to let us do this. It’s finally here. Harbor SmartSphere® re-invents the whole concept of delivering research value. It’s to business research what the Pervasive Internet will be to business itself: a huge injection of dynamic intelligence and sheer voltage. SmartSphere® is online, interactive, dynamic, and visualized. There’s nothing static, rigid, or dead about it. Eventually, we at Harbor will do everything in SmartSphere® that we used to do on paper, and we’ll do it better. And you can, too. in a custom-configured project of your own, SmartSphere® can be anything you want it to be.

And yes, you can get printed reports. We’ve re-invented those, too. Not fixed, one-size-fits-all printed reports, but custom printed reports that you configure and SmartSphere® creates for you on the fly in PDF format.

See SmartSphere® and find out more right now:

1. Visit our free, live SmartSphere® demonstration. They say pictures are worth a thousand words. So what are they worth if they’re pictures of your whole world, and you can fly around inside the pictures with your mouse?
2. Download a brochure on the SmartSphere® research platform and services (PDF, 970 KB).
3. Download a brochure about our SmartSphere® “living research” projects on the M2M/Pervasive Internet phenomenon (PDF, 240 KB).

A small portion of an interactive Harbor SphereMap™. This one portrays a company’s world. You “fly around” the map by dragging it with your mouse, bringing into focus any area you want to explore. You see a company’s peers, investors, products, and alliance-structure at a glance. Clicking nodes fetches additional information from the database. Shift-clicking nodes creates new maps of other companies—and maps of markets, too.

Projects, projects, projects. Ours, and yours.
SmartSphere® is an online platform that Harbor uses to deliver Web-based services. You don’t buy SmartSphere® the way you buy a program for your computer. You buy access to one or more SmartSphere® projects. We define projects of our own on important high-tech subjects, and clients can subscribe to those projects. Clients can also define their own custom (and completely private) projects.

SmartSphere® projects are laser-focused on their subjects. No waste, no fluff, no irrelevance. A SmartSphere® project delivers continually updated information on whatever the project has been defined to track. Some of that information is created in the good old-fashioned way, by experienced researchers and analysts. And some of it is created with 21^st century tools like automated news feeds and Web-based info services. Every time you log in to a project, there’s new information—freshly tracked events, new company alliances, new company and market comparisons, enhanced company, market, and technology profiles, and insightful Harbor commentary and analysis.

When you visit our SmartSphere® demonstration, you’ll see a limited version of our own “Pervasive Internet Suppliers” project. Bear in mind that the free demo offers limited information and functionality. The full “Pervasive Internet Suppliers” project, for example, was created to replace and improve our own earlier online publication, Pervasive Internet Report.

Custom SmartSphere® projects. Your secret weapon has arrived.
You’ve heard about some of our SmartSphere® projects. Now let’s talk about yours. Does your company have business development, M&A, R&D, or sales and marketing goals? We hope the answer is yes. How would you like “living business intelligence”™ on the companies that interest or worry you? Or on the markets and technologies that are defining your future? A custom SmartSphere® project is the perfect way to do that. “Living business intelligence”™ means research that is laser-focused on your targets, and continually updated for as long as you need it.

Any collection of companies, markets, or technologies can become the backbone of a SmartSphere® project. You define who or what they are. You define what you want to track about them, and how you’d like to rank or score or weight them. You define the types of cross-company or cross-market comparisons you’d like to see.

Take action and take control.
If you’ve read this much about SmartSphere® without clicking something, it’s time to click. Here are those links once again.

1. Visit our free, live SmartSphere® demonstration.
2. Download a brochure on the SmartSphere® research platform and services (PDF, 970 KB).
3. Download a brochure about our SmartSphere® “living research” projects on the M2M/Pervasive Internet phenomenon (PDF, 240 KB).