The Triumph of Ethernet: Technological Communities and the Battle for the LAN Standard (review)

The Internet is now the subject of a substantial scholarly literature, in part because of that network's impressive scale and worldwide scope. But another key part of our information infrastructure has been less visible to the public and to historians: local area networks, or LANs. These are the networks linking computers within a single campus or office building; like local streets feeding into the highway system, LANs provide most of us with the means to access the Internet. In The Triumph of Ethernet, business historian Urs von Burg provides one of the first scholarly accounts of the history of LANs.

Von Burg focuses on Ethernet, one of many LAN technologies introduced in the early 1980s, and seeks to explain how it came to dominate a highly competitive market. Its triumph was no foregone conclusion: it was not clearly superior technically (indeed, many experts considered it inferior to alternative systems); its proponents pursued a risky collaborative marketing strategy; and one rival system, called token ring, was backed by the behemoth IBM. Von Burg's explanation rests on two claims. First, he argues that technical standardization was crucial to the growth of the LAN industry, because the value of a network increases if it can be interconnected with others. He describes how the promoters of Ethernet—including inventor Robert Metcalfe and an alliance of companies including the Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and Xerox—decided to make it an open or nonproprietary standard, thereby allowing any interested firm to enter the market for Ethernet products.

This leads to his second point: that the Ethernet promoters succeeded where their rivals failed because they were able to establish a "technological community" around the standard, a group of competitive yet collaborative suppliers who contributed their own research and development efforts to improving the performance and lowering the cost of Ethernet. In contrast, "Ethernet's proprietary rivals ultimately failed to build 'ecosystems' with numerous firmly committed and independently innovating firms" (p. 164).

Von Burg describes in detail the invention and technical workings of Ethernet and its main rival, token ring; the subsequent efforts by established computer manufacturers and "new economy" start-ups to commercialize LAN systems; and the struggle to establish Ethernet as a standard—both de jure, through standards bodies, and de facto, in the marketplace. He combines insights from economic theories of standardization and the social construction of technology to make a convincing case for the importance of technological communities in explaining the market success of failure of LANs.

One of the book's strengths lies in the fresh insight derived from interviews with fifty leading participants in the LAN industry. Its main weakness is its one-sided preoccupation with market explanations. It is aimed more at economic or business historians than historians of technology, who will not find it news that "standards do not just happen or result from a mechanistic 'tipping' process; they are agreed upon in negotiations involving a large number of firms, entrepreneurs, institutions, and users" (p. 203). A former venture-capital business analyst, von Burg focuses almost exclusively on commercial actors, ignoring the role of the Department of Defense and other noncommercial organizations in promoting Ethernet. For example, he claims that "the success of Ethernet as a LAN technology in becoming a marketplace standard ran contrary to the conventional wisdom of the time, which strongly favored keeping technological innovations proprietary in order to derive as much profit as possible from them" (p. 9). By the time the Ethernet community was formed, however, the International Organization for Standardization had already published its Open Systems Interconnection standards for networks, which popularized the concept of open systems, while the Internet, whose TCP/IP protocols were also in the public domain, provided a highly visible example of open standards in practice. In the commercial world that von Burg...