The industry is at it again–trying to figure out what to make of Metcalfe’s Law. This time it’s IEEE Spectrum with a controversially titled “Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong”. The typical statement of the law is “the value of a network increases proportionately with the square of the number of its users.” That’s what you’ll find at the Wikipedia link above. It happens to not be what Bob Metcalfe claimed in the first place. These days I work with Bob at Polaris Venture Partners. I have seen a copy of the original (circa 1980) transparency that Bob created to communicate his idea. IEEE Spectrum has a good reproduction, shown here. The … Continue reading Simeon Simeonov