Telecosm
By George Gilder
Free Press, 2000 - 351 pages

First off, don't read this book hoping to get investment advice. That isn't Gilder's expertise. The guy is an economist folks. His rise to fame may have been during the telecom boom but he became well known during the Reagan era when he wrote a book on entrepreneurial ventures and how it was the key to creating wealth in this country. Reagan dragged this guy around the country folks because of his insights into the entrepreneurial spirit! Gilder sits on panels at conferences with such luminaries as Peter Drucker, Lester Thurow, Andy Grove and other intellectuals.

When you read this you will find out the following

1) There is a lot of technical jargon in it. Most should be able to learn what he is saying but it isn't like reading a trashy, romance novel. You have to think. 

2) He is trying to convey the fundamental change that telecommunication technologies will have on the economy. Having worked in telecom and being a closet economist with an MBA I can say this guy knows his stuff folks. The impacts will be felt starting this year when fiber in the metropolitan markets connects into businesses with Ethernet. But, I don't want to digress too much. 

3) Gilder uses excellent prose and superb metaphors and I believe it is critical that people understand that Gilder, nor I, know when this stuff will finally start to affect us. Right now there is an all out depression going on in the capital markets for telecommunications. This will affect the deployment and timing of some applications/technologies.

Gilder, through his prose and descriptions of technologies/service companies describes how increasing bandwidth supplies its own demand. This is true folks. As prices drop for bandwidth applications always pop up that gobble it up. Here is the kicker and frankly, where Gilder falls short. You get what you pay for! Gilder talks about the endless limits of fiber backbones and the applications that will be created and could occur. I completely agree but only corporations are willing to fork out the bucks to get the high bandwidth directly to their doorstep. To get such high bandwidth to the consumer would result in digging up streets nationwide and costing close to a trillion dollars.

This book is great. I have read this book and his other tech book, Microcosm (on semiconductors.) If you want to learn about technology those are two good books to start with. If you want to learn about how companies become category killers and create HUGE wealth read The Gorilla Game by Geoffrey Moore

There are lots of reviews of this book that rubbish the content on the grounds that there is a bandwidth glut and because telcommunications companies crashed during the dot.com nonsense of 2001. What the reviewers miss is that the demand for bandwidth was entirely thwarted by stupid management practices in telecommunications companies. There is pent up demand for bandwidth. One day, the flood gates will open. The devil is in the details. The bandwidth glut is artificial and temporary, caused only by the last mile of the network having encountered bone-headed business practices and government legislation. Gilder will, one day, have the last laugh.

George Gilder is Chairman of Gilder Publishing LLC, located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He is also a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute where he directs Discovery's program on high technology and public policy.

Born in 1939 in New York City, Mr. Gilder attended Exeter Academy and Harvard University. At Harvard, he studied under Henry Kissinger and helped found Advance, a journal of political thought, which he edited and helped to re-establish in Washington, DC after his graduation in 1962. During this period he co-authored (with Bruce Chapman) a political history, The Party That Lost Its Head. He later returned to Harvard as a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics and editor of the Ripon Forum. In the 1960s Mr. Gilder also served as a speech writer for several prominent official and candidates, including Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and Richard Nixon.

In the 1970s, as an independent researcher and writer, Mr. Gilder began an excursion into the causes of poverty, which resulted in his books Men and Marriage (original version 1972) and Visible Man (1978); and hence, of wealth, which led to his best-selling Wealth and Poverty (1981). Mr. Gilder pioneered the formulation of supply-side economics when he served as Chairman of the Lehrman Institute's Economic Roundtable, as Program Director for the Manhattan Institute, and as a frequent contributor to A.B. Laffer's economic reports and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. In the 1980s he also consulted leaders of America's high technology businesses. According to a recent study of speeches, Mr. Gilder was President Reagan's most frequently quoted living author. In 1986, President Reagan gave George Gilder the White House Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. In 1996 he was made a Fellow of the International Engineering Consortium.

The investigation into wealth creation led Mr. Gilder into deeper examination of the lives of present-day entrepreneurs, culminating in many articles and a book, The Spirit of Enterprise (1986). The book was revised and republished in 1992. That many of the most interesting current entrepreneurs were to be found in high technology fields also led Mr. Gilder, over several years, to examine this subject in depth. In his best-selling work, Microcosm (1989), he explored the quantum roots of the new electronic technologies. A subsequent book, Life After Television, published first as a Whittle Communications monograph and then published by W.W. Norton (1992), and updated and republished in 1994, is a prophecy of the future of computers and telecommunications. This book is a prelude to his latest book on the future of telecommunications, Telecosm (2000).

Mr. Gilder is a contributing editor of Forbes magazine and a frequent writer for The Economist, the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Over the past several years, he has dismissed many of the most touted new technologies—from HDTV and interactive television to 3DO game machines and CD-I multimedia, from TDMA wireless and Nextel cellular compression to pervasive ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks. Embraced instead: All-optical networks, smart radios, Qualcomm digital wireless, Stratacom frame relay, mediaprocessors, Netscape browsers, and Sun's Java programming language.

George Gilder lives in Tyringham, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Mountains, where he is an active churchman, sometime runner, and with his wife Nini, parent of four children.