A special year

In fact, 2023 was a very special year for me. After founding eco and managing it for almost three decades, it was time for me to let go – and hand over the reins to my successors. Unlike many companies where just one of the founders concurrently runs the business, eco has never lacked strong successors. They turned out to be Alexander Rabe and Andreas Weiss.

What has always made eco great, what makes it so special, has always been what matters: that we have experts in all niches who have the courage to break new ground, who have the stamina to deal with resistance, and who are also smart enough to admit to misconceptions and learn from them. Alex and Andreas are not only vigorously leading eco into the future, but they are also doing so in their own unique and inimitable way.

Towards the end of the hot summer of 2023, when things were starting to get serious and I was on the verge of becoming sentimental, you luckily whisked me away. To a party. You got a whole room full of fellow travellers together and gave me a real surprise. What kind of party was that? It certainly wasn’t a farewell party. It wasn’t my party at all. It was, once again, our party. And the book created especially for me shared collective stories. Those who were there heard many more stories from the past – and later in the evening, even from the distant past.

Shaping the Internet. Shaping the future. That has always been our aspiration and it will remain so. Those who attended our party also had conversations that may one day become stories themselves. There is more than enough material for that. As Honorary President, I now have even more freedom to pick out the stories that I like best.

One of these stories involves quantum computers. Superposition and entanglement: these are two phenomena that are difficult to comprehend. Is a qubit able to represent the two states 0 and 1 simultaneously (and also any state in between)? Are two particles supposed to be so connected that they can change their respective states simultaneously or, as physicists say, “instantaneously” over any distance? What Einstein once struggled with is now the basis for a completely new way of building computers and solving complex tasks.

Where will this lead? This has been the same question we’ve been asking for almost three decades. And the answer is also the same: It is in our hands.

Harald A. Summa
Honorary President and eco Founder