This URL of possible interest appeared recently on Interesting-People:
http://worldofends.com/
Well stated and well reasoned. I wish I could convince my market-droids of
that.
Fortunately or otherwise, I find my customers *awful* hard to convince of
that. They have this crazy notion that there is also value in
cost-effectively providing services to that world of ends that will make
their lives happier, for some definition of that term. So they continually
find ways to make the stuff that connects the ends "interesting", and in so
doing create value in the connection between the ends. Things like the
ability to apply policy to routing, to decide who they will neighbor with,
what they will believe from whom, how their routes will be engineered, and
that sort of thing.
Well, to be completely honest, there are a few that don't; they are the
ones who go out of business. But the ones that stay in business seem to
have that predilection.
The thing that gives me fits is when they define things that force paths
through the network to be symmetric, or maintain state in the network, or
enable the ends to over-run the network's capacity without it being able to
do something to ensure that the network of ends get reliable service.