Metcalfe's Law is Wrong  Communications networks increase in
value as they add members--but by how much? The devil is in the
details  Illustration: Serge Bloch Of all the popular ideas of
the Internet boom, one of the most dangerously influential was
Metcalfe's Law. Simply put, it says that the value of a
communications network is proportional to the square of the
number of its users.  The law is said to be true for any type of
communications network, whether it involves telephones,
computers, or users of the World Wide Web. While the notion of
"value" is inevitably somewhat vague, the idea is that a network
is more valuable the more people you can call or write to or the
more Web pages you can link to.  Metcalfe's Law attempts to
quantify this increase in value. It is named for no less a
luminary than Robert M. Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet.
During the Internet boom, the law was an article of faith with
entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and engineers, because it
seemed to offer a quantitative explanat