In October 1991, Howard Charney, co-founder of 3Com, and Bernard Daines, an expert on Ethernet and networks began brainstorming for the "next big idea in the network" house Charney in Los-Gatos, California. Participants included David Boggs, one of the inventors of Ethernet, 3Com and former managers Ron Crane, Larry Birenbaum, and Andy Verhalen. The team batted around and eventually rejected several proposals for a few months until Birenbaum asked the question: "What if we just did Ethernet to go faster?" While 10-megabits per second (Mbps) Ethernet market share for local area networks (LAN) was between 80-90%. It was a mature market. Group volumes continue to grow, and prices were falling, and the total revenue remained flat (see figure 1). Venture capital financing and corporate was mainly focused on 100 Mbps Ethernet successors, namely Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). Birenbaum said that "most pundits industry believes, Ethernet was dead. He just got 10 Mbps and had some other perceived shortcomings. The ATM and FDDI considered whizzy and sexy and exciting." Despite the flood of interest and capital to move in a different direction, the team decided to look at whether they can significantly increase the data rate Ethernet. They realized that they could develop and switches combine FDDI physical layer with CSMA / CD MAC layer, to create a "Fast Ethernet". With the market in favor of standards-based solutions , Charney and his team found that the existing standards committees could play a useful role in legitimizing its new technology, and it can be positioned as "extension" of existing standards. Founders - now consists of Charney, Daines, Birenbaum, and Jack Moses 3Com former marketing executive - has officially launched the Grand Junction Networks to set this up in February 1992, "Hide
. by Andrew Rachleff, Bethany Coates Source: Stanford Graduate School of Business 14 pages. Publication Date: January 2, 2007. Prod . #: E240-PDF-ENG
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