The Grid seems like a book from the future. I've bought over 100 books related to the Internet looking for ideas that could lead to a public company, but this one is the best. The Grid starts with simple comparisons (Chicago came from rail and 'caching' of grain elevators and stock yards) then gets technical. The topics are covered by experts and include distributed computing, sensing,and teleimmersion, programming tools, services, schedulers, resource management, visualization, security, protocols, Quality of Service, operating systems and interfaces. The pen-ultimate section was co-authored by recently deceased Internet Society head Jon Postel, and is my favorite. If covers the past, present and future of network infrastructure. The last section is test beds. At the risk of seeming ungrateful for this gold mine of future net business, there are a few omissions that I missed including the Grid in mixed environments. Low-earth orbit satellites and wireless IP broadband could have been covered, as they will be the very important parts of the Grid. The VR section totals only about ten pages and, surprisingly, doesn't even touch on entertainment applications, though entertainment (including porn) has driven many 'seeds of the grid', including video, CD-ROMs, and streaming video. A few books that might be interesting: Peter Glaser's Solar Power Satellites is very complementary: with cheap power everywhere, the grid can cover the earth, seas and even leap up into space. If you haven't read it already, I'd toss Kurzweil's Age of Intelligent Machines into the Amazon shopping cart to fill in the AI and VR gap. If you want to see how grids could grow into gods, I'd also highly recommend David Zindell's The Wild. I'm open to corresponding about where The Grid goes and grows from here, especially from investors with the know how or desire to capitalize on the new entities that will grow out of the grid, or be used to create it.
