 NEWS
Pushing back from oblivion
By -- Stephanie Sanborn
December 8, 2000 1:01 pm PT
Push technology had one of the most meteoric life spans in recent technology history, climbing to starry heights before the push industry almost completely crashed and burned. But for all the drama involved with push's mid-1990s demise, the idea of proactively distributing information to users had a definite appeal.
"Push was a good concept, the idea of getting news or information out to people more or less before they know they need it," says one IT manager of an online sporting goods business, who requested anonymity, that dealt with the effects of PointCast and other early push vendors' products on the company network. "The problem with push was that the reality didn't live up to the promise when it first came out. Bosses were not real happy when they found out that all these sports scores were affecting network performance."
Although push vendors tried to solve the bandwidth-clogging issues associated with push by using dedicated caching devices and other options, the damage had already been done; by the end of 1997, push was considered dead. Nevertheless, a few companies, such as BackWeb Technologies and Marimba, stuck by push, and by the start of 2000 had tweaked the technology to solve the bandwidth problems its previous incarnation had caused. Thanks to the positioning of push as a business application rather than consumer-focused entertainment and to advances in bandwidth technology, push has slowly but surely been built in to e-business applications, portals, and other programs. Interest in corporate internal use of push is growing and the future of push technology no longer seems bleak.
"Now we see very valuable business content being pushed out to users -- customer issues that somebody needs to be notified of in a timely manner," says Gartner's Phifer. "I think we've finally figured out how to leverage push effectively."
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Push technology
1981: Foundations of push are laid when City University of New York and Yale University establish Bitnet to provide e-mail, listserv capability, and file transfers between the two schools
February 1996: PointCast becomes the first to publish push content, garnering much attention from the advertising and entertainment industries
December 1996: Well over a dozen companies touting push technology make appearances at Internet World; field grows to include companies such as Marimba, Individual, and eventually Microsoft and Netscape, which add push capabilities to their browsers
March 1997: Microsoft proposes Channel Definition Format standard for push technology, which some take as a sign that push is here to stay, despite rumblings over bandwidth issues
May 1997: IFusion Com dies, one of the first push-technology companies to become a casualty
July 1997: Analyst firms begin to publish reports outlining push's shortcomings, ringing the first death knell
January 1998: All but a few companies abandon push; some, such as the Marimba-Microsoft partnership, try to build up the business side of push such as pushing software updates out to customers automatically; survivors recategorize themselves, becoming "broadcasters," "data aggregators," or "information management" companies -- an association with push is now viewed as a death wish
November 1999 to present: Use of push as an internal technology grows; with advances in bandwidth and more targeted applications, push's potential for use as a business technology begins to be accepted; BackWeb ramps up its Polite Push technology, which prevents bandwidth clogging by pushing data to users only when there is room on the network for the push traffic; other companies, such as Marimba, pare down their push services and begin focusing on embedding push technology in other business applications
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