Disruptive technology

Take a cheap WiFi router and add some mesh networking software, and before you know it he Telcos are obsolete. Read Cringely’s theory about how it will unfold:

A disruptive technology is any new gizmo that puts an end to the good life for technologies that preceded it. Personal computers were disruptive, toppling mainframes from their throne. Yes, mainframe computers are still being sold, but IBM today sells about $4 billion worth of them per year compared to more than three times that amount a decade ago. Take inflation into account, and mainframe sales look even worse. Cellular telephones are a disruptive technology, putting a serious hurt on the 125 year-old hard-wired phone system. For the first time in telephone history, the U.S. is each year using fewer telephone numbers than it did the year before as people scrap their fixed phones for mobile ones and give up their fax lines in favor of Internet file attachments. Ah yes, the Internet is itself a disruptive technology, and where we’ll see the WRT54G and its brethren shortly begin to have startling impact.

RTWT for the theory, which sounds crazy, but who really knows?