It's like a very long cat...

I love analogies. I usually explain concepts using them. I find them fun. Today at work I listened to someone a handful of levels above me say that "We will move to IPv6. For the upgrade we just have to add more numbers to the IP address". My instant reaction was one of ridicule. Then I paused. And then I thought that it was a good enough analogy for the level that person needs to speak at. Of course it's way more complicated than that, both the concept, tech, and the transition. But if the problem is we're running out of addresses globally, we need to move to something with more addresses. Like 10 digit dialing for phones from the 7 digit.

It's still not as good as the quote that's attributed to Albert Einstein:

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

Is the simplistic explanation almost nothing like the problem and solution? Yes. Is it good enough for the current purposes? Yes as well. Sometimes you have to dumb it down until there is no cat.