Claude Shannon at Bell Labs
This sounds like a promising book.  I read the <i>The Idea Factory</i> a few years ago, which is a related and fantastic book about the history of Bell Labs.<p>Around that time I came across an interesting idea.  I don&#x27;t remember if it was in the Idea Factory, or in material I read afterward, but it&#x27;s related to one of central ideas from this excerpt:<p><i>The sender no longer mattered, the intent no longer mattered, the medium no longer mattered, not even the meaning mattered: A phone conversation, a snatch of Morse telegraphy, a page from a detective novel were all brought under a common code.</i><p>The idea I came across is that:<p><pre><code>    Shannon&#x27;s information theory, devised at AT&amp;T, indirectly led to the demise of AT&amp;T&#x27;s monopoly.
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Before Shannon, there was no concept of the information-carrying capacity of a wire.  And AT&amp;T&#x27;s monopoly was largely due to it having the biggest set of wires, which as you can imagine were expensive to deploy in the 19th&#x2F;20th century.  I remember that calling California from NYC was a huge achievement, precisely because of the number of physical wires that had to be connected.  AT&amp;T was the first to offer that service.<p>So I think the argument was that it made economic sense for a single organization to own all the wires, so it could maintain them with a set of common specifications and processes.  But if you can reduce every wire to a single number -- its information-carrying capacity -- then this argument goes out the window.  You can use all sorts of heterogeneous links made by different manufacturers and maintained by different companies.<p>(I&#x27;m not sure if this is historically accurate, but technically it sounds true.)<p>So my thought was that there&#x27;s an analogous breakthrough waiting to happen with respect to cloud computing.  Google and Facebook have information monopolies based on centralized processing of big data in custom-built data centers.  Likewise, AWS has a strong network effect, and is hard to compete with even if you have billions of dollars to spend.<p>So my question is: Is it possible there will be a breakthrough in decentralized distributed computing?  And could it make obsolete the centralized cloud computing that Google&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Amazon practice?  Just like AT&amp;T had no reason to be a monopoly after Shannon, maybe a technological breakthrough will be the end of Google&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Amazon.<p>Maybe this idea is too cute, and you can poke holes in it on a number of fronts, e.g.:<p>- Shannon&#x27;s ideas were profound, but they didn&#x27;t actually bring down AT&amp;T.  AT&amp;T was forcibly broken apart, and there are still network effects today that make re-mergers rational.<p>- Centralized distributed computing will always be more efficient than decentralized distributed computing (?)  I&#x27;m not aware of any fundamental theorems here but it seems within the realm of possibility.  (EDIT: On further reflection, the main difference between centralized and decentralized is trust, so maybe they&#x27;re not comparable.  Decentralized algorithms always do more work because they have to deal with security and conflicting intentions.)<p>But still I like the idea that merely an idea could end an industry :)<p>Relatedly, I also recall that Paul Graham argued that there will be more startups because of decreasing transaction costs between companies, or something like that.  But it still feels like the computer industry is inherently prone to monopolies, and despite what pg said, the big companies still control as much of the industry that Microsoft did back in the day, or maybe more.