Transcript Laws of the Web

Introduction to e-Commerce
Laws of the Web
Dr. Michael D. Featherstone
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Laws of the Web
Moore’s Law
which describes advances in the speed of digital technology, in particular microprocessors.
Metcalfe’s Law
which relates the value of a digital network to the number of connections (or users or
members) it has.
Power Law
which relates to the distribution of Websites and the relative ‘Popularity of sites as measured
by inbound links.
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Laws of the Web
MOORE’S LAW
The most popular formulation is of the doubling of the number of transistors on integrated circuits every 18 months
However, it is also common to cite Moore's Law to refer to the rapidly continuing advance in computing power per
unit cost, because increase in transistor count is also a rough measure of computer processing power.
Moore’s Law is named after an observation made by Gordon Moore of Intel in 1965. He observed a rapid growth in
the number of transistors packed onto each integrated circuit and predicted that this trend would continue. Time has
proved the observation to be accurate. In 1965 complex chips had only 64 transistors, while many over 30 years
later, the Itanium processor had 410 million transistors. Exponential means, in this instance, that the number of
transistors double approximately every eighteen months to two years and the performance of processors increases
accordingly (Dave Chaffey, April 2005).
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Moore’s Law
1980
64K Memory
Base Price.. $3500
500K 8 inch floppy disk
Well configured price .. $6000
Price per Byte Mem = $.05
Price per Byte Storage = $.007
2011
4 Gigabyte Memory
500 GB Hard Drive
Price per Byte Mem = $.000000599
Base Price.. $1125
Well configured price .. $1125
Price per Byte Strg. = $.000000002396
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Moore’s Law (does not apply to cars)
1980
Ford Mustang, $6,408
Average car price $5,413.00
2011
Ford Mustang, $36,520
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Laws of the Web
A little video
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Laws of the Web
METCALFE’S LAW
The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of
nodes on the network.
Metcalfe’s law relates to the power of an interconnected network to enable collaboration and extend the reach of an
organisation. We often forget that Internet is short for ‘Interconnected network’
The web followed what is known as Metcalfe’s law first stated by Bob Metcalfe, who was co-founder and former
chief executive of networking company 3Com. He was reputed to have said in presentations made for the company:
‘The power of the network increases exponentially by the number of computers connected to it.
Therefore, every computer added to the network both uses it as a resource while adding resources in a spiral of
increasing value and choice.’
(Dave Chaffey, April 2005).
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Networks 101
What is the ‘Value’ of this network?
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Networks 101
What is the ‘Value’ of this network?
V a N²
V= Value of the network
N=Number of nodes in the network
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Metcalf’s Law
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Value of network
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Individual network value
Community network value
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Size of network
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Power Law
POWER LAW DISTRIBUTION OF WEBSITES
In many networks, nodes have about the same number of links to them. But on the Web a few pages have a huge
number of other pages linking to them, and a very large number of pages have only a few pages linking to them.
Northeastern University’s Albert-László Barabási and his colleagues coined the term “scale-free” to characterize such
networks [see “Scale-Free Networks,” by Albert-László Barabási and Eric Bonabeau; Scientific American, May 2003].
Many people were surprised because they assumed Web pages would have an average number of links to and from
them.
Power laws as related to websites may be verbally represented as:
•a very few sites that rank very high in the number of inbound links;
•a larger number of sites with close to median numbers of inbound links;
•a great number of sites with very few inbound links.
In short, the Web has many small elements, and few large ones. A few sites have
millions of pages but millions of sites have only a few pages. A few sites have millions
of inbound links, but millions of sites have only a few inbound links.
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Power Law
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Relative popularity
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Relative popularity
Search referrals
Page views
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Position of item in sequence
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This Concludes Today’s Presentation
Thank you for your attention
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