This post from Christopher Carfi's blog caught my eye today as I was catching up on reading. Cristopher's one of the Principals at Cerado, a company that helps companies with competitive intelligence and other tools to use the network more effectively.

Maybe it's because I've been offline for several days, but there's a whole deja vu theme playing in my head as I catch up on reading.

For Your Radar: The "Economics Of Abundance"

In a nutshell: Economics, economies and economic theory have all been based on economics of scarcity. That is, scarcity drives the "laws" of economics. A number of things have hit the radar over the last few months that are of note:

Chris Anderson (author of "The Long Tail"): The Economics of Abundance -- The speech that Anderson made at Pop!Tech this year.

Mike Masnick: The Scarcity Myth

Nick Carr: Knockoffs roil Second Life - A great example of what happens when one tries to force-fit an economic model based on scarcity into an environment where information is free.

David Hornik: Tough Choices

This idea is going to hit the mainstream press and boardrooms in a big way in 2007.

The whole idea of a network economy of abundance isn't new. And while Chris Anderson's Pop!Tech presentation made and big splash, David Hornick has been talking about this for a long time.

Let's think about it. When was it exactly that we ran computers on slow dial-up connections, equipped with 20 meg hard drives and 640K or RAM? Not that long ago. What changed fundamentally was that Microsoft, and as a follow-on, the entire tech sector, quit treating computing resources as scarce commodities. We treated memory, CPU, storage and network connections as limitless resources. We ignored the illusion of scarcity and assumed abundance.

Operating systems and software applications bloated to enormous size, and nobody cared. long gone are the days of tight assembly code optimized for size and memory utilization. Now we develop programs and simply tell users they have to upgrade to the latest OS, add memory, and get a bigger hard drive. Abundance ignores pre-existing barriers.

The economy of abundance ignores preconceived notions. And it's been around in networking, but downplayed by the carriers, for years.

One example - optical networking. Dense Wave Division Multiplexing technology in networks isn't new. I was teaching DWDM classes in 2000. If we can multiplex light spectrum, by color, to carry multiple OC-192 (That's transmission speeds of up to 9953.28 Mbit/s (payload: 9621.504 Mbit/s; overhead: 331.776 Mbit/s)) (It's probably the fastest commonly available connection to the Internet), why are we still talking about DSL and broadband in terms that make T1 speeds seem revolutionary?

Simple, the carriers haven't found a way to monetize the higher speeds at a high enough profit ratio. Sure, Verizon talks FIOS, and it absolutely requires investment, but the bottom line is the technologies in widespread use today provide a glut of capacity in the backbone. We have an abundance that we don't fully utilize.

We don't use it because we wait for carriers to provide it at a cost we'll pay. The economy of abundance tells us that is fundamentally the wrong approach. We've seen it historically time and again with CPU speeds, memory and storage.

The way to drive costs down is to burn bandwidth like there's no tomorrow and load up every potential stream with more and more information.

Assuming abundance and using resources as if they're abundant, creates abundance. Check the history.

I agree with Christopher, but I also feel like this isn't new. I think said these same things in talks five or six years ago, Time to quit talking and start consuming. Voice, video and unified communications will be most successful of we get off the dime and use them.

In the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams, the premise was "if you build it they will come." In the abundance economy of the Internet, the corollary is reversed, If we use it, they will build.