Some people see RFID tags as more than an efficient means of managing a supply chain - they see them as a revolution. Scott McNealy, the chairman of Sun Microsystems, views RFID tags as one of the keys to "connecting everything with a digital, electrical or biological heartbeat, even inert objects - and conceivably every object on the planet - to the network", according to an article in the December 2003 issue of Sun's internal magazine.
"The evolution from a network of hundreds of thousands of computers to millions, billions, even trillions of things will be here much sooner than we expected," McNealy is quoted as saying.
While it may seem far-fetched, this scenario is far from infeasible. After all, if phone numbers are mapped to the domain name system with ENUM, it will not be any harder in a technological sense to map the identifiers in RFID tags to the DNS.
Since both RFID and ENUM have raised the ire of privacy groups, it's hard to imagine a situation where everything has an RFID tag and is monitored around the clock as coming into play any time soon.
"There is a level of stupidity that is reached at some point in time. For every great idea there are a hundred stupid ones."
-- John Brand, Meta Group
A key area in which RFID is expected to make ground is in corporations tagging everything in their building for asset management.
"I think it is likely at some point in time," said Meta Group analyst John Brand of Sun's vision to connect every object to a network. "I think there are benefits for some organisations in terms of asset management."
However, he discounts some ideas that have been mooted, for example talk of a chair that communicates with the table to check whether the person is sitting in a good ergonomic position. The information is then relayed to an insurance company which adjusts premiums based on risk.
"There is a level of stupidity that is reached at some point in time," said Brand. "For every great idea there are a hundred stupid ones."
