Bits Blog: Networking Battles to Run the World

Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Using sensors, Cisco can keep track of how long people are waiting at train platforms.

Cisco has a simple message: the world has bought so much of its equipment, why stop now?

Both Cisco Systems and one of its biggest competitors, VMware, talked about ambitious strategies Wednesday. The powerful data centers and networks they want to build, tied to millions of sensors and devices, promise to create all kinds of efficient systems with an eye on everything we do. Just as much, they talked about competing with each other.

Even before Cisco spoke, VMware was making its claim to a world where billions of devices were sensing the world and suggesting efficient actions. Rather than depending on legacy customers, VMware is counting on inspiring thousands of software developers, who will use computer networks as a platform for new business.

It is similar to the way Microsoft used outside developers to give it an edge on the personal computer, and Google used them on the Web. Networks are more specialized technologies, however, so it’s not clear they can attract a mass of outside talent. Cisco is hoping big companies will be better allies.

Speaking at a gathering of journalists and networking industry analysts, several Cisco executives outlined what they called a “$14 trillion opportunity” in bringing sensors, communications and data analysis to all the world’s traffic systems, hospitals, refineries, and other civil and business infrastructure.

“The first 10 years (of the commercial Internet) were really about transactions, and the last 10 were about interactions,” said Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer. “The next 10 is about processes being more efficient.”

That efficiency, she and others said, involves developing networks with enough machine intelligence to offer highly personalized experiences, big data analysis, and automated management of the overall system.

In a demonstration that blended the stirring and the slightly creepy, Cisco showed off how it has deployed wireless technology that can see how long people are waiting at train platforms, or moving through markets. Cisco is installing sensors in its own parking spaces, so people can be told where to leave their cars.

Combining these two technologies, the company showed how stores could tell prospective shoppers what the waiting time is at a checkout line, and how much parking is available at the mall. There were similar examples about managing electricity grids, tracking patients, and running safety systems on oil rigs.

Cisco has already deployed about $180 billion worth of network equipment into the world, she said, and will build hardware and software that interacts efficiently with the legacy gear, so new kinds of intelligent systems can be quickly deployed.

Backing up that message of size and scale, Pankaj Patel, Cisco’s chief development officer, noted that Cisco spent $5.5 billion on research and development in 2012, “an amount larger than the revenue of some of our competitors.” VMware’s revenue for 2012 was $4.6 billion.

Impressive for Cisco, though the company has outlined this ambition before. The real challenge may be in reaching customers at stores, dams and the D.M.V., people away from its usual customer base of network engineers.

“We’ve generally dealt with an information technology route to market,” said Robert Lloyd, Cisco’s head of sales. Now, “it’s going to be Rockwell, General Electric,” and other companies that create large industrial systems, he said, adding, “it’s a major transformation for the company.”

Ms. Warrior also talked about the strategy as a way that telecommunications providers could increase the value of their products.

VMware, in announcements it made alongside EMC, which owns most of VMware, shared the idea of really big networks tied into more of our lives and systems. VMware said it was merging its Nicira property, perhaps the most advanced network dominated by software, into its data center and security groups, and not into custom hardware, with its cloud computing and security products.

It also announced that it would use its history in server virtualization to enable customers to swap computing jobs among corporate computers and public clouds of computers, like Amazon. There was, in addition, a nod to allowing many different types of devices on its network.

What it needs to do now is inspire lots of developers, filling its networks with Cisco-like futuristic applications. That is probably part of its next big announcement.

Cultural Studies: Social Networking Takes a Strange Turn

Sending out the invitation was an accident, you see, a great big techno-blunder, the result of mental diffusion and attrition. For months, I had been worn down by one LinkedIn pitch after another. Trying to be polite to whoever was doing the inviting, I at first attempted to accept, but accepting entailed joining LinkedIn, so I ended up deleting, somewhat guiltily, the solicitations as they arrived.

Then came that special day. In a haze of absent-mindedness, I received an invitation from someone with whom I had been wanting to renew an acquaintance. I clicked on accept. I was redirected to a registration page. After filling in the fields marked as required for instant human linkage, I found myself staring at photographs of four people, all known to me, and being asked to attempt to connect with one or more of them. I was also offered — this should have been accompanied by the soundtrack to the shower scene in “Psycho” — the opportunity to click on a tab innocently designated as “select all.”

Now, like a child absorbing the warning never to talk to strangers, I had assimilated the familiar admonition never to click on the “reply all” tab on my e-mail screen before undergoing days of reflection, introspection and legal consultation. However, although my information-laden cerebellum had at last registered “reply all” in its avoidance file, the antediluvian underside of my brain apparently saw no point in cross-referencing “reply all” with “select all.” Entering the functional sleepwalking segment of my afternoon, relieved on some level to be surrendering to the status quo, happy finally to oblige, I steered my cursor into the heart of the new tab in my life and wearily clicked.

I got a handful of acceptances. Then I got some more. After a while, I started receiving a few e-mail messages from friends and concerned acquaintances explaining, with a dash of defiance and a hint of disapproval, why they didn’t “do that sort of thing.” I was mortified. As the author of a book exposing the Internet’s dehumanizing qualities (“Against the Machine”: like it, share it, recommend it, tag it, Digg it, e-mail it, hug it, take it out to dinner, add to your shopping cart now), I should have been the last one to be suckered by a social networking gambit.

But the mortification was nothing compared with my horror when I realized that none of the people responding to my invitation were the people to whom I had intended to send it.

A frenzied investigation and a few maddeningly pert screens later, LinkedIn proudly informed me that it had sent out the invitation to 974 potential connections. Somehow, beneath the site’s aggressively agreeable aspect, there lurked an alien life form that possessed the capacity to use e-mail address books to lure earthlings back to its own world (Planet Distractoid) by masquerading as a suspiciously formal small-town Rotarian: “Zitlon XYZ has indicated you are a friend.” Because I had had the same AOL account from the dawn of my e-mail existence, LinkedIn was able to make its digital overtures to every person or entity I had ever contacted in that medium. All 974 of them.

Lawyers, landscapers, accountants, literary agents, baby sitters, window-installers, art dealers, ex-girlfriends; the ex-boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend (don’t ask), obstetricians, dentists, ophthalmologists, gastroenterologists, urologists, psychologists, pediatricians, billing offices for all of the preceding, the design director of Victoria’s Secret (what?), editors who were no longer editors, bosses who were no longer bosses, enemies, rivals, my estranged brother (it’s complicated), my ex-wife, two litigious former landlords, Marisa Tomei (long story), the International Red Cross, people still around somewhere and those who, like my mother, had made the journey to the other side (password accepted!) from our signed-on, linked-to, downloading-now, uploading-complete earth — they all received an invitation to be “professionally connected” to their old pal, Lee Siegel.

I tried desperately to interrupt the e-mailing process but succeeded only in deleting the endless lists of invitees, not the invitations themselves. Like the fugitive past, the LinkedIn process was inexorable (and perhaps unethical, I learned later, thanks to a security breach caused in part by the blandly affable company’s failure to “hash” and “salt” subscribers’ passwords like so many boiled potatoes). Yet thanks to the debacle, my past was no longer so fugitive. It was all around me. Here, in a network with 974 nodes, spread out like some existential atlas, seemed to be every interpersonal action that had shaped my destiny.

It grew worse. A few nights later, I found myself at a literary banquet, amid a swarm of people, at least a third of whom had received an invitation to be professionally connected to yours truly. Two subjects of Olympic-league grudges looked at me from across the glittering room with an indecipherable expression. Did my invitation out of the blue provoke in them feelings of vindication, scorn or conciliation?

The truth was that I could barely remember the cause of the friction between us. The Internet nightmare was becoming something like a dark fairy tale. I was struck by the moral: Virtual space cannot reconcile what real time has lost. In social networking’s death-defying universe, your remotest past is but a click away. But it isn’t. That evening at the fancy dinner, I was standing indifferently beside people with whom I had once, professionally and personally, been passionately involved.

The same applied to the other invitees. It went without saying that the friends among them regarded the invitations with, at the very least, perplexity. As for the others, what was once a lively bond between us had given way to fading affinities for one reason or another, not to mention the fact that some of the invitees had died. The bewildered, broken or, should I say, evolved links might have been an abomination in the robotically social perspective of LinkedIn, but such change is the most natural thing in the world. Social networking, I realized, is a type of asocial engineering. It tries to disguise the finality of time — the most consequential dimension of relationships — with the cozy convenience of spatial proximity. It is an attempt to place a smooth screen over the time’s wrinkle, to put Botox on the face of mortality itself

So Mom, if by some numinous chance, you received my invitation, excuse the impertinence. (But if you happen to run into Bellow, Mailer or Updike, would you mind asking them to add me to their professional networks?) Everyone else, kindly click on the following message from me that is most applicable:

Forgive me.

E-mail me.

Please go away.

Let’s have lunch.

Why did you do that?

Whatever.

You have no idea how much I miss you.

Lee Siegel is the author, most recently, of “Harvard Is Burning.”