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 COLUMN TO THE EDITOR February 11, 2000 To ASP or not to ASP?
I personally would not be willing to risk my company or my assets on any third-party off-line ASP provider for several reasons. 1. Security. As we have seen recently, hackers can break in and steal data readily from almost any site they target. A nasty competitor or a nasty kid might take out my business in a keystroke. 2. Reliability. The Net is a flaky thing: Servers crash regularly, and sometimes it's just some intermediate link that takes down your ability to talk to a specific site. I couldn't rely on having someone holding not only my data, but the application to run it on in some remote location run by someone I can't control. And vendor company size is no guarantee; some of the biggest names have some of the clumsiest sites. 3. Speed. Even with high-speed access, it's nothing compared to my hard drive interface or even my local network interface. Since software bloat is so prevalent, downloading key components could waste time, and if the ASP downloads a big portion of their programs to my disk, then I might as well buy the whole package and install it here. 4. Response time. Some Internet connections are slow enough, even through high-speed links, that the response to my commands (say, even to just retype a word), is frequently delayed. This would be a never-ending source of frustration; it's bad enough now. 5. ASP vendor support. Once a few hundred thousand people are using an application at once, the amount of support available and the computing resources required to handle the load will be wholly inadequate. As slow as Lotus Notes runs on my PC network, with only a relatively small number of users, I can't imagine what 100,000 simultaneous users would do to it. We'd end up with snail mail as the fastest link in the chain. 6. The "fly-by-night" nature of e-commerce sites. Most of the companies out there doing any e-work are losing money fast (Amazon.com, e*trade, etc.) and may be out of business in a heartbeat (witness the DIVX, or Digital Video eXpress, debacle). If the outsourced data center evaporates, what then? Especially if the data or application is proprietary, making regeneration of the data more complex. Frankly, I see ASPs as a step backward. If hard drives and processors still cost what they did in 1990, and if the Internet was all converted to T3-level (or at least cable modem) speeds, then maybe there would be a place, but I see ASPs as an attempt to make a quick buck and not as a viable way of actually doing business. We have enough buzzwords, TLAs [three-letter acronyms] and hype-based businesses generated in marketing departments worldwide without throwing in hazardous methods for doing business. Maybe ASPs will work for some small segment of the market in a few years (5 to 10?), but I won't be jumping on this particular bandwagon (which I doubt will even exist 5 to 10 years from now). Thanks for letting me spout! Bob Zorich, Carlsbad, Calif. Internet stock bubble IF YOU WATCHED ALL (or actually any) of the commercials Sunday during the Super Bowl you can guess why I say Bob Metcalfe's prediction happened (see From the Ether, Nov. 8, page 102). It is only a matter of time now. I enjoyed two commercials: the Volvo Truck (I took a year off from computers and drove a big truck) and the Cheetah Mountain Dew chase and extraction. Every Internet company commercial was a bomb and makes me question management if they hire and approve of commercials like those. Carl Hooker, Barre, Vt. Software innovation vacuum IN ED FOSTER'S Jan. 31 column on the "greatest innovations of the 1990s," he claims that the top innovations come from other countries, not America (see "The greatest innovations in technology in the 1990s came from other countries," page 115). Mr. Foster misses the point: There are many excellent innovations in America, but they cannot reach the mainstream computer market because of Microsoft's stifling software monopoly. For example, a multithreaded, multitasking operating system with high reliability and a consistent, easy-to-use user interface was invented here in the United States, but was locked out of the PC preload market by Microsoft's restrictive preload agreements. The name of that OS? IBM OS/2 Warp. Even today, OS/2 also includes the following innovations. * The first Intel-based desktop OS to bundle a Web browser * The first Intel-based desktop OS to include Speech APIs, speech recognition, voice dictation, and voice navigation built into the OS itself * The first Intel-based desktop OS to include Java as a native API Another innovation squashed by Microsoft was pen-based computing. Also, superior utilities such as Gazelle Systems "Optune" disk optimizer were run out of business by Microsoft giving away mediocre substitutes for free. The American consumer was denied access to these innovations due to the monopoly in the U.S. PC software market. Markets in other countries were not as closed to non-Microsoft innovations. So it is not merely a matter of creating innovations -- which Americans are good at -- but also getting them to market, which Microsoft either prevents or absorbs. Tom Nadeau, Dickson, Tenn. Ed Foster responds: That actually was my point. Or, more precisely, my point was that Microsoft and a few other major players in the software industry in this country have created an environment in which the sparks of innovation do not seem to catch fire. And those same players have now written a law called UCITA (the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act) that, if enacted, will help ensure that this will continue to be the environment in this country for years to come. Holiday shopping online I ENJOYED READING Sandy Reed's column "Shopping in the online wonderland was a good experience for most in '99" (see Jan. 31, page 87). In my personal experience with online shopping, I have found companies that are accustomed to tight shipping deadlines and high customer service expectations, such as gift delivery services or mail-order catalog companies, have made the online transition much easier than traditional brick-and-mortar stores where immediacy has not traditionally been an issue. The service problems experienced by online users this past holiday shopping season should have come as no surprise as traditional category killers have become fledgling dot-coms. Everyone has a learning curve in e-commerce. Saird Ellen, Cahir Hartford, Conn. AOL class action suit I WAS THINKING of suing America Online myself for interfering with my ability to create Web sites based on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 (see "AOL faces $8 billion lawsuit for software interference," Feb. 7, page 12). Customers who use the America Online browser see their Web sites in a completely different design scheme than users who dial up outside of AOL using an independent ISP. What AOL has done with their browser is nothing short of interfering with legitimate businesspeople who are in competition with AOL's own services. It's a subtle interference for which the clients blame the developer when, in fact, it is the browser causing the problems. I'll give you an example for you to judge on your own. One of the sites is www.irshelp.org. The site is designed with a maroon banner that runs vertically from top to bottom on the left side of the background. There are no other margin banners within the site. Yet AOL's 5.0 browser inserts a similar banner on the right side of the background as if it is replicating a mirror image. It took six times longer to design around a phantom image that the AOL browser interjects into the experience. Robert M. Worth Jr., Grand Rapids, Mich.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Enterprise ApplicationsOperating SystemsWeb TechnologiesSPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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