Mannerisms

At CES in Las Vegas, last month, Bill Gates, Founder and Chairman of Microsoft, said that this is the year of home networking, and announced a home server to do the job.

In February, at the Globalpress Summit in Monterey, Dr Henry Samueli, Founder and CTO of Broadcom, said that home networking is 20 years away.

It's one of the great things about the hi-tec business, there's almost nothing you can say about it which is entirely true, and there's almost nothing you can say about it which is entirely false.

On even such a fundamental proposition as home networking, on which reams are written and avalanches of words spoken, views can be diametrically opposed.

To an extent it all comes down to character. Gates, the software guy and abstract mathematician, thinks networking is a no-brainer to be delivered by code, standardization and protocols.

Samueli, the practical hardware engineer, looks at the plethora of physical communications media coming into the home, coax, phone line, powerline, Ethernet and WiFi, the vast multiplicity of the different connection types and the insane proliferation of standards and concludes that meaningful networking is a couple of decades away.

It's a great comfort to see Gates and Samueli so fundamentally opposed. It means that anyone's opinion on home networking, whatever that opinion may be, has a chance of being right.