Man in the white suit

"CHANGE IS HARD," said my friend Dave as 2001 wound down. "Yes, but not changing is harder," I replied as Dick Clark proved us both wrong on the TV screen behind us. Our Dorian Gray with a beat, Dick has been measuring time and whether or not you can dance to it for half a century now.

As we face the new year, the Test Center's dominant theme is disruptive technology. The very term trembles with the double-edged sword of unsettling innovation -- winners and losers, peer-to-peer vs. client/server, wired or wireless. As we're poised at the cusp of the transition from Industrial Age to Information Age, it's instructive to recall an elegant comedy from 50 years ago, The Man in the White Suit.

In the British film directed by Alexander Mackendrick, Alec Guinness portrays a young engineer who invents an indestructible fabric (and white suit) that resists wear and tear. Spurred on by the beautiful daughter of a textile factory owner, Guinness attracts the support -- and then the enmity -- of both management and labor as the owners struggle to hold on to their profits and the workers their jobs.

To some, the film remains as wry and fresh as it was in 1951; to others, it's a prophetic warning of the dangers of technology. As the Guinness character's landlady puts it, "Why can't you scientists leave things alone? What's to become of my bit of washing when there's no washing to do?"

Combine my favorite disruptive technologies -- Web services, p-to-p, 802.11 -- and you've got the breeding ground for a man in a white suit. The 802.11 technology, or Wi-Fi as the faithful call it, is the fabric: a short-range wireless solution that competes with microwave ovens for an unregulated spectrum of bandwidth.

Too small a space to attract the hungry maw of the Federal Communications Commission, the Wi-Fi domain gains its power by linking small neighborhoods into an aggregated WAN. Bootstrapping DSL and cable modem access to the Net, cybercollectives have sprung up from rooftop to rooftop, offering 802.11b's 11Mb on-ramps for laptops, PDAs, and iPaqs.

The cost of Wi-Fi has dropped precipitously as the standard has been baked into low-cost PC cards and access points. I'm writing this column from an IBM ThinkPad T23 with built-in 802.11 some 300 feet from a Linksys access point ($179) attached to a DSL broadband connection.

Microsoft seeded the broadband market at the desktop level by investing in Comcast and then in AT&T. Even with its growing cash reserves, Microsoft was, and remains, unable to buy a controlling interest in a major carrier. Instead, the strategy has been to bankroll the buildout of two-way cable broadband and force the Baby Bells to the table with DSL services.

With the recent consolidation of AT&T and Comcast, Microsoft owns 6 percent of the combined company and, more important, keeps AOL Time Warner at bay. But even with a credible competitor to DSL and pressure from satellite acquisitions such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.'s proposed buyout of DirecTV, Microsoft still has little leverage in the battle with the carriers and their cell phone allies led by Nokia.