“How’d You Come up With Metcalfe’s Law?”, caseysoftware2023-03-22 (Metcalfe’s Law; backlinks)⁠:

Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I’ve talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I’d chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I’d been dying to ask: How’d you come up with “Metcalfe’s Law”?

Metcalfe’s Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system.

When I finally asked him, he looked at me and said “I made it up.”

Me: “… what?”

Him: “I was selling network cards and I wanted people to buy more.”

Me: “… what?”

Him: “If I could convince someone to buy 4 instead of 2, that was great. So I told them buying more made each of them more valuable.”

It was mind-blowing because so many other things were built on that “law” that began as a sales pitch. Lots of people have proven out “more nodes are more valuable” but that’s where it started.

See Also:

• Moore’s Not Enough: 4 New Laws of Computing: Moore’s and Metcalfe’s conjectures are taught in classrooms every day—these four deserve consideration, too

• Hall’s Law: The 19^th Century Prequel to Moore’s Law

• On Proebsting’s Law

• The Empirical Metamathematics of Euclid and Beyond

• A Research Note on Deriving the Square-Cube Law of Formal Organizations from the Theory of Time-Minimization

• Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

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