September 19, 1999
from the Friends:-ASP-Survival-Guide dept
Ok... I admit it. My Yahoo mail has been over the maximum 3M limit for the last year. Last week I finally did something about it. I downloaded all my mail to my home machine and am only using Yahoo mail for my daily inbox. While this change in my daily email habits may seem small, I see it as a failure of the much hyped emerging business model called the Application Service Provider (ASP). The ASP hosts applications on their server and then rents or gives away their application as a service. This is a beautiful idea... no upgrades, no fancy hardware required, global access, and relatively cheap to run... a slam dunk. So why are the pioneers in the ASP market blowing it? Click below to read more...Ok... I admit it. My Yahoo mail has been over the maximum 3M limit for the last year. Last week I finally did something about it. I downloaded all my mail to my home machine and am only using Yahoo mail for my daily inbox. While this change in my daily email habits may seem small, I see it as a failure of the much hyped emerging business model called the Application Service Provider (ASP). The ASP hosts applications on their server and then rents or gives away their application as a service. This is a beautiful idea... no upgrades, no fancy hardware required, global access, and relatively cheap to run... a slam dunk. So why are the pioneers in the ASP market blowing it?
Placing Limits
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If you are going to offer a service be prepared to go all the way. There is nothing more frustrating than setting up a hosted application, becoming familiar with it and then realizing the limitations. Why does Yahoo limit the size of the user's inbox to 3M? The cost of disk space is essentially free. Since I moved my mail to my home computer I have significantly reduced the time I spend on Yahoo mail. Strike One.
Security
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Not protecting the security of the users' data is not good. If you haven't heard then you must live in a box. Last week a hole the size of Nebraska was found in Hotmail. Everyone rushed in and read everyone else's mail. Imagine that instead of your email application, everyone had access to your personal finances, or your company's customer databases. Perhaps Microsoft did it on purpose... to undermine ASP credibility due to the threat that it poses to their existing business (MS Office)? Strike Two.
Reliability
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If you offer a service it must be available all the time. Last April I used WebTurboTax (web-based tax software from Intuit) to do my taxes. It worked great, and except for the submission fee, it was free. I was a strong WebTurboTax advocate until last week. When I returned in order to calculate and submit my estimated taxes, it would not even let me login! Are my records still there? Who knows? Strike Three.
Crap-Ware
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Remember when people first started creating web-sites and everone just put their print brochures on the web? They called it "shovelware", because the marketing departments were shoveling their stuff onto their website with complete disregard for the new medium. I think we are about to see a new form of this which I'll call crapware. Companies that have Windows applications are going to mirror the functionality through a browser front end. Bad idea... especially if they implement the application as a huge Java applet (cringe...). With Sun's recent purchase of StarDivision the maker of the popular MS Office clone StarOffice, Sun is setting themselves up for a big crash. Don't get me wrong, I've used Star Office and I think it is as good if not better than MS Office as a client side application. One word of advice: keep it on the client!
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