RE: ARTICLE: Despite the buzz, peer-to-peer startups lack busines s benefits

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

From: Jeffrey Kay (jkay@ENGENIA.COM)
Date: Thu Dec 21 2000 - 10:06:39 PST


Now there's a serious idea -- peer to peer tee-shirts.

I think Napster is actually a pretty poor example of P2P. Napster has
educated the greater community that P2P exists, but it really doesn't
represent it because the value proposition of Napster is independent of the
P2P infrastructure on which it runs. In all reality, Napster could have
been just fine running as a single server farm with millions of connected
users had there not been copyright law to circumvent.

As you know, I'm solidly in the P2P camp, but right now everyone and their
mother is claiming to be P2P because of all the attention that Napster is
getting. Even AOL considers AIM to be P2P. (Reminds me of the early days
when FTP purported to be the Web.) This something that companies like ours
have to address in some serious fashion for P2P to become "legitimate".

Jeffrey Kay <jkay@engenia.com>
Chief Technology Officer, Engenia Software Inc.

"First get your facts, then you can distort them at your leisure" -- Mark
Twain
"Golf is an endless series of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle"
-- Sports Illustrated
"If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y plus Z. X is
work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." -- Albert Einstein

-----Original Message-----
From: Gregory Alan Bolcer [mailto:gbolcer@endtech.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 11:12 AM
To: Jeffrey Kay
Cc: 'fork@xent.com'
Subject: Re: ARTICLE: Despite the buzz, peer-to-peer startups lack
business benefits

In the Internet economy, a value has been placed on
having access to people & building up a community. Given
Napsters equation of a month or two ago, $800M/35M = about
$22 per person of worth for every user. Now this "worth"
doesn't live in a vacuum; if Napster started spamming their
users and abusing their privacy, then I am sure this
number would get down around the same worth as banner advertising
or even spam mail.

What other tech craze has been able to have so many people
buy into it in such short amount of time? Independent of
any P2P serious business benefits, there's a benefit to
having access to that many "eyeballs".

Hell, Napster could have made a couple of million a month
selling t-shirts alone. That's pretty serious business for
some.

Greg

Jeffrey Kay wrote:
>
> Interesting article indicating that P2P technology lacks serious business
> benefits --
>
> http://www.ecompany.com/articles/mag/print/0,1643,8782,00.html
> 


Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Dec 21 2000 - 10:13:06 PST