Yup. Good point. You're thinking like a business man. You hit the nail on the head. If these companies implemented the fully capable version of Light Peak soon, where do they go from there? These companies aren't stupid. They're gonna milk it a while. That will buy a few more years of another technology for which we all will need to buy connectors and adapters. Then we can all buy everything all over again... in a few years.
I don't understand why cable TV providers can implement affordable fiber optic infrastructures across a whole city, but a tiny, really expensive computer can't.
Cyberbob beat me to the punch. It really is Lite Peak.
I don't like this attitude. Its like with Verizon's FIOS, they lost a ton of money in it because, simply put, the spent something like $20B. They won't recover that for many years, and when you consider interest on the bank, they could've better spent it on, say, upgrading to LTE in 2010.
But the advantages is since its sunk is that they now have a great infrastructure with minimal costs going forward; furthermore, it pushes down the competition. FIOS prices though are very low and at a loss-but, since its a sunk cost, no one really cares anymore.
As far as what companies do in the future once done with lightpeak, the problem with this answer is I don't know. And you don't know. And if either of us knew, we could get very rich by developing a useful technology. Just because you don't know a possible direction doesn't mean one doesn't exist.
A reality here is manufacturing. Of course, they need to make money back on old technologies, usually to pay for future R&D and infrastructure as well as their own excessive stock options. But releasing a technology without a built infrastructure is useless, and if you don't believe that, try finding me a 1080p LCD TV from 20 years ago. The technology was there, but ways to do it cheaply weren't, and even if you could sort of fabricate one, you had to spend a lot of money on infrastructure to do it-you would never be able to make enough.
And that's the thing with technology. You need the facilities to produce Ivy bridge, for instance. And currently Ivy Bridge isn't capable of making money, so you have to use your capacity to produce what is (Nehalem, Westmere and soon enough, Sandy Bridge). But until you can establish a stable enough supply to keep an income, as well as making sure the resources you devote can be profitable, you can't do it.
And that's what a lot of us geeks fail to understand about science. Yes, you can theoretically do something. Or you can even practically do something. But can you do it effectively at a low enough price to build the facilities to constantly do such a thing?
Intel has a lot of facilities that use copper. Converting them to produce fiber would be very expensive, and will probably happen slowly, and only when they have enough facilities to make the materials in large bulk without disrupting current supply lines will it become feasible. Yes, they can make a 100Gb/s cable, fiber, all that. But can they make tens, maybe hundreds of millions of them within a year?
