At 10:18 PM 8/6/01 -0700, Tim May wrote:
the fax effect. I imagine that the fax machine overcame the fax effect when a company with, for example, an east coast and a west coast office bought two of them and then could send documents coast to coast in seconds. They didn't care that no one else had one; it was boosted productivity immediately.
You clearly don't understand the usual meaning of "fax effect." Fax machines have existed in the form you describe for close to a century. This was not what writers in the early 90s were referring to when they spoke of the "fax effect."
He's talking about how to *bootstrap into society* an artifact wit fax-effect problems ---ie, which must be present at both ends to work -phones, faxes, Navajo, protocols..
The fax effect is the same as the phone effect. Your analysis would have had the first two phone changing the world overnight. No. What changed was when a significant fraction of one's suppliers, delivery agencies, shipping companies, customers, etc. all could be reached via a compatible, interoperable standard. The "phone effect."
Theodore Hogg has done work on phase changes in topological (network) systems --like percolation in rocks, and other network effects. At some level of porosity, a body of rock becomes much more permeable, because the pores often interconnect. I can't help but think this relevent. In any case, its clear you need a perceived benefit, probably expressable in dollars (but maybe reputation), for early-adopters to 'seed' the population. But you can't seed if you don't have something to deploy, slow and expensive though it may be at first.