Works
- Metcalfe's Law after 40 Years of Ethernet, Computer 46, no. 12 (IEEE), 2013
In Thinking Tools
Known for
Coinventor of Ethernet and cofounder of 3Com. In sales presentations in the early 1980s he argued that a network's value grows with the square of the number of compatible devices it connects, a claim George Gilder named Metcalfe's law in Forbes in 1993.
Caveat: The square law is a rough heuristic; Andrew Odlyzko and others have argued that real networks gain value more slowly, closer to n log n, since not every connection is worth the same.