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Who Owns The Data/Apps?
A reader writes: "There's an interesting Dan Gillmor column about the whole ASP/online storage thing. What happens when these places go away? What happens when they change? "
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Well, I don't know about the sites hosted on sourceforge, but I do happen to know what Taco and Hemos will do.
Call me an old fuddy duddy, but I like my cars fast, my women skinny, and my apps on my hard-drive.
It's lack of knowlege on the part of legislators. Wise and meaningful legislation can not be expected to come from ill-informed and less than technically astute legislators.
You think they pass laws like UCITA because they're ignorant?
What incentive do they have to make informed decisions rather than sell our rights down the river?
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
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Sooo.. you can save this very story on *your* own personal piece of cyber-space!
But what if they change something without telling you?
Then what?
Huh?
Then who ya gonna call?
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
"And I can see little reason why anyone should use it for their business. Having your HR, email, accounting run by complete strangers leaves your company wide open to all sorts of disasters"
Organizations have been outsourcing these computerized services for nigh on 40 years now. And probably for 10,000 years before that, in non-electronic form. I would guess that 90% of the paychecks issued in North America are handled on an outsourced basis by ADP, Ceridian, or PayChex. Same with HR and e-mail. Where do you think IBM has been making all its money in the last 5 years?
High volume, low value transactions are always going to be a candidate for outsourcing. The keys to doing it successfully are due diligance, a good contract lawyer, and auditing.
sPh
As an ASP employee, you are of course entitled to your idea of how the relationship should work.
... well, that customer will get what it deserves. (In fact I had meant to say "application config" in my original post, but I was pounding it in quick at lunch).
As a person who has negotiated such contracts for large corporate purchasers, however, I can report that the customer is _entitled_ to what the contract says he is entitled to. And anyone who signs such a contract that doesn't say the customer is entitled to a copy of the application configuration (e.g. the SAP config tables)
Luckily, these contracts are usually negotiated by the sales force, and if you catch them at the end of their quarter and let them know you have two alternatives in your back pocket, they will browbeat their own lawyers and management into agreeing to just about anything you need!
By the way, I have also worked on ore processing contracts. And it isn't unusual to include a clause that says if you are unable to deliver the refined product, I am in fact entitled to an amount of your natural gas equivalent to what I need to smelt it myself.
sPh
If you are getting involved with outsourced storage or apps, you absolutely need the assistance of a lawyer who has worked with this type of contract before. Contrary to current hype, neither the ASP model nor outsourced storage is new, so there should be good examples around (can you say "service bureau"? If not, that tells me how young you are).
At a _minimum_, your contract must absolutely specify that the applications, data, and backups belong to you and only you, that you can recover them at any time, that such rights survive change of control and bankruptcy, that you will receive a copy of your backup tapes at a meaningful interval (daily, weekly, hourly?), and that the vendor will sign the necessary contracts with insurance companies and bonding agencies to ensure that these things happen.
That's a MINIMUM from a non-lawyer. Before you take chances with your company's future, you absolutely must get good legal advice and assistance. Otherwise you might be finding out what happens to a person with "C" in their title when your employer makes a claim against their D&O insurance.
sPh
The only defense users will have is contracts. Contracts spelling out what the ASP is to provide and what the liabilities of the ASP are. They contract should also spell out monetary penalties to be applied to the ASP payed to the service user for deficiencies in service.
Pay for service, get payed for lack of service. No buisness should sign with an ASP without getting guarantees on data access, data retrevial and data security. The process should be insured by a third party and audited by a fourth party.
Right now places like MSN have a "we can screw with your data all we like contract" that is designed to protect their asses. No buisness in its right mind should trust that service. Buisnesses need a contract that protects their asses. For the ASP buisness to work both parties need their asses covered by contracts. ASPs need to provide support and protection to the service users as much as the ASPs need protection for their actions. This support needs to be contractual and financial to ensure that it is legitimate.
Until ASPs put their cash on the line no buisness should really commit heavily to their use. If I pay for a critical service level I want $$$ back if that service level is not provided.
Me: Hi, someone abandoned a car in our lot
Cop: Well, the police aren't allowed to tow abandoned cars from private property.
Me: Oh
Cop: But, you know, if that car was, say, blocking a lane on Route 9 (4 lane local highway the store was on), we'd have to tow it as a nuisance.
Me: Er...
Cop: And its quite a windy day out, sometimes wind moves stuff about...
Me: Right [Click]
- few minutes later -
Me: Hello? you never guess what happened....
Car was gone in 15 minutes... :)
Anyone stupid enough not to have local copies of their current source tree deserves to lose their project.
I won't argue with that, but what is more important, is that SourceForge is a center for all this information, which make it convenient for users. If SourceForge was to go down, half of todays opensource-projects would temporarily be down, and all links broken.
Most projects don't have alternative download-sites. When SourceForge is down or unreachable from your connection, you will not only be stopped from downloading many opensource-projects, but sometimes even all of the working projects that you are looking for.
It has happened to me before.
This post is licensed with GPL ;)
"The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages." - Tao of Programming
That's why ASP's will never control the market.
Welcome to capitolism.
Ben
They own the disk drives, not the data stored on those drives. If I park my car in a free parking lot, the owner of the lot does not have the right to sell or scrap my car.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
No one really cares that you won't use .NET. However you're making a jackass of yourself by somehow equating thin clients with ASPs. For the past decade business schools have been preaching like some kinda jerks about out sourcing services and trimming out the middle tiers of your company's pyramid. The aspects of a company not related to actual production of your product are black holes which you have to throw money into. So the outsourcing model was envisioned, you hire a company to provide service for you and be your infrastructure. ASPs are the next step in that concept by being your contracted high tech grunt workers. Ergo they've got nothing at all to do with thin clients. It's about out sourcing a service you need for a much lower price than it would cost you to build your own department to provide said service. It's up to you as a business person to have a good contract with your ASP which will make sure your data will be protected if the ASP ends up out of business. I don't feel sorry for people who should have known better in the first place.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What you must do, however, is ensure that the arrangements you make with a company hosting your data provide a means for you to recover the data in the event of them winding operations down, and ensuring that any "upgrades" that may interfere with your operations are notified to you well in advance. If they're worth their salt, they'd have a decent SLA to cover such things.
If they're not happy providing such a thing, avoid them like the plague, but the likes of Storage Networks seem to be doing rather well off the back of large ISP's/Co-Lo's where they claim to offer a very flexible, low-cost storage solution.
It's a trade off, pure and simple. If you can afford to have your own EMC or sun storage array(s) (and scale them when you need to), then do it. If you want the services of an SSP, without the hefty outlay to buy storage, fine, but be careful, and keep your eye on them, and the fine print.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
Probably the people you pissed off with your elitist attitude...
Now in the interests of "no overkill", could you get the company's web designers to change the font size on the home page to something in points, not pixels? The current "12px" setting comes out at about a 6 point size on many high-resolution, high-pixel-density screens. Print it out on a laser printer and see what it looks like... Now where did I put that magnifying glass???
Just a pet peeve of mine...
For custom software, the contract should cover the bankruptcy of the developer. If they go under, you get the source. A similar arrangement could be made for ASPs. If one goes under, you get the DAT tapes.
Life is a psychology experiment gone awry.
Thats the problem. You probably don't have the resources to do so -- SourceForge is losing money for the company, and has become so overgrown that to rehouse the data on it would ultimately amount to breaking it all down into little pieces anyway. History's going to show that it wasnt M$ that killed Linux, it was VA.
VA thought that changing the inherently anarchaic order of the Linux community could be profitable to a company. It isn't. They thought that housing everything under one umbrella was a good idea--Turns out they couldn't afford to hold their umbrella up.
Bowie J. Poag
Why could anyone be expected to pay money for A) what they got for free for so long, and B) what they helped build to begin with?
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Perhaps a more poigniant question:
VA continues to slip steadilly towards bankruptcy. Most analysts give the company a TTL of ~6 months. That means, if your project is housed on SourceForge, you and your project are going to have to find a new placew to live within the next 6 months. The pipe that VA leases (yes, they pay money for it. No pay, no play.) will dry up leaving you without access and more than likely without adequate warning as well. Thats been the cast with most of the
Maybe now you see my point for all the yelling and screaming I did about how it was a mistake to centralize development at one location--Youre assuming that location is going to survive, when the evidence says it won't.
Lets further examine our mess for a moment--The resources that VA owns that you visit frequently, ala Slashdot, Freshmeat, and others--What's going to happen to them? Is there a plan in place that describes what to do when your parent company hits the skids? If Themes.org can be taken down for several weeks over something as simple as a security breach, it tells me they're largely unprepared for these sorts of events. Everyones got too much sunshine going up their ass to sit down and think about what to do when the party's over.
Don't go tell me "Oh, VA's a good company, they'll find a way to rescue us!" because thats total horseshit. You and I both know that business doesn't work that way. Rob and Jeff can't exactly go back to their dorms..So where's our beloved Slashdot going to move to? If they cant remain profitable on their own, or under the management of a parent company, who's to suggest they can be profitable at all?
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Thank you, Captain Obvious...
If you don't have any cash on you, you're hooped when the ATMs are down. Very few people I know rely completely on the banks.
In the ASP world, this is like saying that everyone keeps local copies of current projects, but uses the ASP for non-critical data, backups of old projects, etc.
I doubt that this will be widely used though, security is too hard to get perfect which for most businesses, is a requirement.
Think of the banking analogy, if someone transfers $100,000 out of your account (if either of us had that to begin with...) it'll leave an audit trail. It's pretty easy to prove that you didn't do that and get your money back.
The thief might have gotten the $100k, but it's a generic $100k...
Now imagine that your data was stolen and deleted. Even if the ASP has decent backups and can restore it, your non-generic data is out there, in the hands of your competitors perhaps.
On a related note, ATM transactions only require a second or so of network time, can you imagine the problems of having to be connected the whole time you're using MS Word (for instance) in order to save your document?
I can see the ASP model offering some benefits, when used with standard systems, but in the diskless workstations that people predict...
I think it says something that many bank employees (higher-level security types) (two of my friends) do keep their money in their matress, or rather, do keep enough cash on hand to deal with a week-long bank outage. It's good enough to rely on for the little things, but you want to be able to buy food when it inevitably dies.
thanks, but I had already checked it. That's where I learned that the cd can't be properly checked.
The problem is that I shouldn't even have to do that. gamecopyworld.com is a workaround to a broken system. It just alleviates the pain, but doen't cure the problem.
I have to say I really don't understand why in the world I'm not allowed to duplicate, exclusively for my own use, something which is inherently non-physical (like the text on a book, or the contents of an Age of Empires cd), without the permission from the publisher. Haven't I already given my money in order to obtain access to the data such products contain? Why should I need to pay twice if something happens and I lose access it? Didn't I pay for it?
You mention the book example: in a way, I think the situation is similar. I just don't photocopy it because a book is something much more robust than a cd, and I need not have as much concern with the way it's treated as I do with a cd.
(Sorry, I accidentally hit the 'post' button when I meant 'preview'.)
Suppose, I give you money for something. And you say, "you can't lend it, give it away, sell it, copy it for your own use, etc, etc". So you're in fact controlling what I do with what I bought from you, even after I already gave you money for it. You are allowed to dictate what I am to do or not to do, even after I paid you for what I bought from you. Is this logical? I don't think it is, and I also find it scary, because you are giving up something that you should not allow to be taken from you in the first place and that is your freedom. Even morally, you aren't doing anything wrong (is it wrong to make backup copies?).
I fully agree with this. That's what I try to do whenever I see something with which I don't agree (in the case of AoE, I didn't knew it was that way, and I also had been using it so I had to buy it).
The problem is people are getting obnoxiously greedy. Please take a look at the software world. Some software houses charge by the cpu (if you have one cpu you pay x, if you have 2 cpus you pay 2x, and so on) for the same piece of data! Do you honestly think this is acceptable or legitimate? I don't think this kind of business practices should be allowed to prevail. What happens in a situation where everybody practices the same thing? You retire and live as a hermit?
I admit, I browse at +3. I am amazed, however, at the number of people failing to see the point (translated by the comments and their respective moderations).
The real issue is not if you trust your data to a free host, of if you use free forums. The real issue is that it seems to me that people are seeing rights being taken from them everyday and they seem to allow it for the sake of comfort. The cases mentioned were but examples of what may happen, even in a non-free (beer) world. I find it amazing how people here bitch about RIAA's, MPAA's and those of their ilk while still buying their products! I mean, how hypocritical is that?
The big problem is that abuses are being commited and people don't do anything against it.
An example: I'm a big fan of Age of Empires II. I usually play with some coworkers of mine after work-hours and this has been going on for some time. Since the copy I had was a cracked one (it was installed on the pc with a no-cd executable) I decided to buy the game, since (even though it's Microsoft and I don't like giving money to them) I think the money was deserved for the long hours of enjoyment it has given me. When it arrived, I decided to make a backup copy of it, since, given the use I give it, I was afraid I'd end up ruining it. To my surprise I found out that the cd's have some kind of copy protection that prevents them from being copied correctly (some serial number recorded in a non-accessible part of the cd so that the cd-recorder won't record it). The only way of using the new copy is by using a cracked executable with the copied cd. I think this kind of things shouldn't be allowed. Backup copying is a legitimate action and shouldn't be taken away from me.
Moves like the one I just related are getting more and more common. A business sees a way of making more money, even though it will completely screw up their customers. What's their decision? Well, "go for it, of course! Screw the customers, they're only human beings and our welfare and profits are far more important that any rights they may think they have!". The weird thing is that, more and more, the customers are agreeing with them. And that's scary. Really scary.
What if your internal IT department didn't have proper backups? The average company is not in business to run e-mail servers and such, and while many companies have excellent IT, in many others it's an afterthought. If it's tax time, do you think the accountants have any more *control* over getting a crashed server back up internally than they do if it's an ASP? The ASP's entire existence is dependent on doing these things well... a failure like this could kill their reputation, trust, and therefore business. If it's an IT department, oh well, someone gets fired. Trust me- ASPs are *incented* not to have this kind of thing happen.
Yahoo and Hotmail are NOT indicative of services designed for businesses. You're right that anyone using them for mission-critical business data is an idiot. You get what you pay for.
In most cases, ASPs are not cheaper than doing it yourself. Check out a few major ASP websites- www.usi.net, www.corio.com, etc.... You'll find that there's very little mention of cost.
What you'll find is all about reliability and assurance. The premise is that an ASP can build out a first-class data center, backup systems, network infrastructure, etc... and split the costs over a large number of customers, offering a highly reliable service for a comparable cost to doing it yourself. If you're a really huge business, you can afford this stuff yourself, but if you're a small or mid-size business, the startup investment of building out a really good infrastructure (from generator-backed UPS to SAN systems) for yourself won't be justified.
Smart ASPs allow their customer to scrutinize their operations- they provide detailed reports on their perfmance, and grant customers the right to audit their own systems to ensure that they are complying with their contractual obligations.
In a lot of ways, working with an ASP can actually reduce risk because there's a contract that specifies precisely what service will be delivered (which is usually heavily negotiated).
Anyone who doesn't do financial due diligence on their key suppliers is an idiot... this is true for ASPs, just as it is for manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, and other key functions companies often have someone else take care of.
Besides, it's usually only the fly-by-night companies that disappear completely when they go bankrupt... most established companies keep operations going for a least a few rounds while they attempt to restructure debt, etc... Plenty of time to get data back. Keeping the lights on is often a LOT cheaper than trying to sell / grow a business.
In any case, financial strength should be a considerable factor in choosing an ASP. If you choose some two-bit operation that could disappear suddenly, that's your own fault. I'm not saying that there aren't risks or that ASPs are some sort of magical panacea... but there are risks in running your own stuff too.
This may be an issue for free / cheap consumer services, but I've seen the contracts the corporations sign with ASPs, and data ownership (including what happens to the data in the circumstance of contract or service termination) is ALWAYS in there and favorable to the corporation.
A key difference of using an ASP (compared to internal IT) is that contract. It spells out expectations and committments explicitly, and if they are not met, penalties. In my experience, corporate lawyers have a full understanding of the implications of that, and the contracts are long and detailed, covering everything from traditional IT SLAs to intellectual property, business continuity, and privacy / confidentiality.
In some ways, a corporation can have *more* "business" control over data and such with an ASP because the contract puts it all on the table.
Again, this does not apply to the bogus unnegotiated click-through agreements on consumer services, but you get what you pay for.
but to tap into the large corporations, ASP's have to either guarantee backups or allow companies to do their own.
Or a combination of both. I prefer to have an ASP that does the backups, and ships me tapes on a weekly basis. I don't want to hassle with the huge bandwidth required, but I want to be able to maintain a locally updated server with pretty recent data in the event of a disaster. I know that kind of takes some of the benefits out of the whole ASP thing (after all, they're supposed to be better at disaster recovery than I am).
What's your damage, Heather?
Anyone who cries when a free website is changed and they are not notified is an idiot
Well, on one hand, I think it's only fair to try to maintain a good relationship with the community, even when you're going out of business. If you know your customers will be screwed by your deletion of data, you have the responsibility to your customers (as well as your advertisers and investors) to at least notify the community 72 hours beforehand. If I was one of their advertisers, and the service just died, I'd be pissed because my name was associated with such poor service.
On the other hand, if I ran a free data storage, and I knew that notifying the public would result in massive bandwidth use (suddenly everyone logs on to get their stuff), then I might not tell them after all. That would be low and underhanded, but sometimes that's how you get through business.
What's your damage, Heather?
I think you just hit on the point here. IF Myspace.com had been charging for its services, it would probably still be in business. Nothing is free. Just because I might be able to access content for free, SOMEONE has to pay for those resources. It might be venture capital, IPO funding, advertising, or out of the back pocket of whoever is sponsoring it. For a small project,
this loss is not significant enough to warrant a
change. I can host a few free webpages indefinitely on my servers, as I'm not even using all the bandwidth I have available.
However, if a site of mine suddenly exploded to the popularity level of slashdot.org, I'd suddenly be in trouble. I couldn't afford to increase the bandwidth without some type of revenue stream. When banner ads were all the rage, this was rather simple. However, banner ads seem to be waning in economic usefulness, so what other revenue source is available?
I could charge people to access my site, but as fun as slashdot is, how many of you would accept being forced to pay to access it? Its a wonderful novelty site, but I seriously doubt they would garner much support in this department.
From the point of view of the consumer, the only price they're really willing to pay is to the ISP for their bloodstream to the internet. In a way, this makes sense too. The more bandwidth they have available, the more bandwidth they'll probably actually use. If somehow some of the connection costs could be funneled to the servers that are getting accessed, this could solve a great deal of the problems, however this would be a micropayment nightmare.
Ultimately, we need a two teir system. We need e-commerce sites that sell ACTUAL PRODUCTS. You know.. those things that I pay REAL money for and when I have it, I can hold it in my hand and call it my very own. Then those sites need to advertise on the other sites that are just trying to pay for their bandwidth. The biggest problem with advertising right now, is that the limited funds available for it are being spread out too thin on sites that don't need it (like for companies that are just using their webpages as a form of advertising)
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
ASPs and Data Hostaging could be the .com boom-bust of 2001/2002.
Because Microsoft said it was the wave of the future! .NET! Cool! Oh, wait, this doesn't look like CIO.com...Where am I exactly?
--
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
SuperID
Free Database Hosting For Developers
I don't understand what the problem with coughin up a few pesos for a site like Sourceforge or Freshmeat is. Slashdot I doubt I'd pay money for now, there's lots of good alternatives available currently. Lots more starting up all the time, too. Themes.org being down does indeed suck, and it does worry me that all these (companies??) run under on corporate flag.
That said, I also find it hard to believe you couldn't run a sourceforge-like project on considerably less dollars than LNUX-Q is spending. What do I know though :).
..don't panic
--
I would also specify the means by which people would get their data back in the event of the business going under or being sold. Again, this is essential part of the ASP business because what an ASP is really selling is security and selling security requires that people trust you.
Absolutely. The banking business model is largely built upon the banks being able to use your money while you leave it with them. Do you really want ASPs using your data while you store it with them?
Mmmmm. Configuration Management.
:)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Bank are trusted in large part because of a huge legal and regulatory structure that restricts their operations. In the States, there are disclosure rules, minimum financial reserves, etc., backed up by the FDIC and the the Federal Reserve Board, etc. Analogous rules for ASP's would require government audited off-site backups with independent access in the event of failure and so forth.
Without such rules, if you pick an ASP you are picking a 19th-century bank that could easily go bankrupt and leave you high and dry.
Did you note the 'public' lot part? Public lot requires the police to lawfully remove it, as an abandoned vehicle. Even in private lots, it may very well take the police to move it in order to be 100% clear.
As for manipulating the data, it surely is. As well as a number of torte offenses, peeking at or manipulating the data can be construed as anything from copyright infringement to unlawful disclosure of trade secret to industrial espionage.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Standard storage contract reads like thus;
'You pay us [x]. We agree to store your data, not to exceed [x] limit, for a period of [x]. We provide a guaranteed avalibility of [x], and bandwidth of [x]. We will provide [x] number of backups on [x] schedule. No transfer of ownership, nor any license is created, in respest to but not limited completly to protection of law such as copyright. Access to client data will be limited to the extent required to ensure its safety. This includes integrity checks, file system scans, and backups.'
There is usally a disclaimer of consequental damages due to loss, etc, but you get the idea.
.sig: Now legally binding!
You're responding to a nonexistent argument; Slashdot mental cases aside, I don't think anyone is seriously making the argument that by storing data on a free server you assign copyright and ownership of that data to the owner of the server. And there's almost certainly an ass-covering clause in each and every ASP's click-through TOS releasing them from even the hypothetical parking-lot owner's level of responsibility.
If you're advocating standards as spec'd by the IETF, the W3C, SAGE, etc., they don't work and are (so far) unenforceable in court (witness the sorry state of browser compatibility, XML 'standards,' and 'standards' in the commercial Web and Internet spaces).
The ONLY thing that will work to prevent this (until the G does decide to step in to 'protect' commerce on the Net, and incidentally, charge fees and taxes and mandate bureaucracy) is a reasonable ironclad contract, drawn up by a knowledgeable and competent Corporate Counsel or other attorney, directed by a clueful CTO or Purchasing Manager (few and far between).
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
Right now, ASP's are not geared towards users doing their own backups. However, as the market shakes out and there is growing distrust of the ASP market, I'm sure that the ASP's will start allowing admin's to connect with whatever software and backup the company directory.
After all, ASP's have some appeal with small to medium sized businesses, but to tap into the large corporations, ASP's have to either guarantee backups or allow companies to do their own.
The .com implosion will continue. When half of the customer base
unable to pay their bills the providers start having problems too.
The capital markets allowed for great experimentation with many business
models and corporate structure. Now with so many out there now it
is time to find out which models will survive. Only the strong will
survive. But, they will survive.
As a group, people over estimate the short term effects and under estimate the long term effects of any new technology. The ASP model has its merits and niches. The short term predictions will not reached. In the long term it will be even greater then predicted.
The early predictions for the computer were something like there would be a need 8 to solve all the worlds problems. I bet in the very short term, the companies who wanted to sell and service those 8 computers were sorely disappointed that there were not 8 buyers to be found. Most of those early companies probably went under. But, we know how that ended up. The same thing happened with lasers, cars, railroads, airplanes and fiber optics. We do not have the laser ray guns but we do have bar-code readers, cd/dvd players and the basis of our long distance commutation network.
ASP's are still in their early stages. They are still looking for the killer app. ASP's are not the answer to all of our problems like the marketing would suggest. But, they ASP model does help to solve many real problems.
Right now if you find a ASP that is a good fit for you, go for it. Read your contract. Have a contingency plan. Read the SEC filings of possible providers. Calculate the cash burn rate. Are they going to be around much longer?
I happen to work for verio on the hosted oracle product. With verio having been bought by NTT, I have the resources to do things in the way that makes the most sense in the long term. Even if someone already has an in house oracle shop they still could use the product to store their recovery catalog, to push out data to share with a partner or cache data for their co-loc / hosted web server etc...
The market is still very young and most oracle people simply do not believe that it is possible for us to offer what we do. Everybody thinks that it is too cheap. There are some great gains to be had with economies of scale. The fundamental issue is that specialization and scaling do provide economic advantage. That concept is the foundation of the free market. If somebody has found a better cheaper way to do things then you do what you are good at and pay somebody else to do what they are good at.
The fundamental idea for ASP's is sound. Change always is slower and more sweeping then we think.
Ross
Actually, I'd say people are drawn to the promise of something they want but can't have. Seriously, when you're running a business, you can't just say "Oh, I'll just train someone to perform IS duties for our company."
Simply deciding who to trust is something that most business owners, large and small, spend an amazing amount of time at. If you don't have expertise in something, how can you judge the qualities of someone who supposedly is an expert?
You're making the assumption that businesses that chose ASPs were doing so because they were greedy. Most likely, they were concerned with survival, pure and simple. Reducing the bottom line isn't a luxury for companies, it's a necessity in a very competitive environment.
You seem to have an axe to grind against management types, which is understandable, but I think you're using a pretty broad brush to characterize all users of ASPs as stupid.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
But think of this from the business point of view. Many companies have a very hard time attracting and maintaining competent technical staff. Like any service, ASPs were really offering their expertise more than anything.
Sure, I could buy a few RAID drives down at Fry's and hook them up to my LAN, but if I were the average "computer guy" that most companies have, I wouldn't really know what I was doing.
People in some businesses were willing to put their bets on ASPs because they finally found someone who seemed to know what they were doing.
Of course, the ASP industry is just like most tech industries - there are a few geniuses, a good number of smart people, and then the lumpen proletariat who are just along for the ride.
As for free website services, you're right. You do get what you pay for. But before you hammer people for believing the hype, remember these "next great things" some of us believed in:
- Linux for the desktop will topple M$!
- Java applets will topple M$!
- The Web will overthrow big, bloated corporations!
- ICANN!
Businesspeople may not be technically savvy most of the time, and they may make stupid decisions, but that doesn't mean that they're all idiots. And they're certainly not alone in wanting to believe things that are too good to be true.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It's a cruel reality of the way the Internet works; People like to "innovate", but not to be held accountable for those innovations. That's why ASPs will never take the place of in-house solutions.
Got Rhinos?
Well, my mother does some consulting for architechture firms. She has to go to various firms throughout the day. Its much easier for her to upload data to a ASP then download it when she gets to her client.
Since the clients accept only certain types of media (ie: someplaces won't take zips) it makes it difficult to save it locally. So ASPs definately have their uses.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
"Save Page to i-drive!"
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
Let's be plain. An ASP doesn't need a team of marketers, much less a VP or a CEO that's making $7M a year.
The death of dotcoms will be the best thing that has ever happened to open source. Why? Because we can successfully offer services that dotcoms can't afford to run anymore. We might even be able to make a living off of it...
LiveJournal is an open source ASP and we're able to deliver a free, open source service to 175,000 users at a profit, with actual paid staff. There is absolutely no reason that someone couldn't do the same thing with other ASPs.
When was the last time that a dotcom really solved your problem anyways? They're all about profit and rarely about innovation anyways; the sooner that the bad ones go away, the better off we'll all be. Stop relying on these f*cked companies to solve all your problems for you.
Here I gleefully purloin the knee-jerk criticism made by the anti-IP slashdot crowd and remind you that data is not a physical object.
Basically, it comes down to what you mean by "own" and "data". The owner of the storage medium owns the storage medium, and can do whatever she wants to the medium, including destroy it. (note: this applies only to the U.S.; many European countries have stronger "moral rights" protections that I haven't studied in sufficient depth to comment upon.) What she can't do is use the stored data in a way contrary to IP law (e.g., infringing copyright or patent).
If you want to make sure your data is protected, store it yourself. If you must use alternative storage, stipulate in the contract that they can't delete the data without your authorization.
http://www.capybara.org/amiga/literature/poagpage. html
ROFL
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If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
My biggest concern is if I allow my apps/data/content to be stored on a remote server what happens when the EUA changes? Can anyone on Slashdot even guess at how many stories have appeared where we've seen personal user information sold or traded after the EUA quietly changes? fsck that. I will not be a user of Microsoft's .NET.
Apps and data should be local. Thin clients are a creature for local LANs, not the internet.
For the most part, I don't think ASPs are worth the risk. I was offered equity but no pay in an ASP company a while back for doing some Palm development for them; it would have looked good on my resume, but as I told the guy making the offer, "I can't eat equity."
ASPs have a certain attraction for business managers because they cut costs, but I still don't see how the risk is worthwile when critical data is on the line. I had a discussion with someone who was talking about "minimizing risk" -- seems to me that outsourcing things like desktop application isn't doing that.
/Brian
of the link right next to Dan Gillmor's headline made me smile, in a sad sort of way.
"Save this link to idrive."
Anyone care to guess which free online storage provider emailed me last week to say they are shutting down the service? -at least they gave _two months_ notice, mind you.
I dunno.. I'm not sure any site with advertising is "free". There are different ways to pay for things, and one of them is to fill your eyeballs with banner-ads. Not that I disagree with your point, I think that if anything, this asks the question - Why would you pay for someone else to 'hold onto' your data, and lose that much control?
air and light and time and space
on the information superhighway:
.Net services will have more and more ads creep into them over time, or require more companion services. Upgrades are more likely to be marketed as extras (additional cost) rather than upgrades.
With a subscription model, the incentive for your ASP to improve and upgrade their app is extremely low compared to their incentives to squeeze more money out of you.
In the shrink wrap business, they've got to come up with good reasons for you to shell out more bucks on an upgrade. = more improvement required than for you to not cancel service.
Your
If the bank screwed up the safe, or "my money" get robbed, the bank can just give other bills that are equivalent in value to what I've deposited.
You can replace my data, buddy. If the ASP screwed up my data, it's gone, and gone forever. Who will be able to make up my data again? It's not replaceable. It's not like the green-backs or some gold pieces, as long as they are equivalent in value, I will happily accept them.
No equivalent for my data!
apparentely no one has heard of the new fad. you know. deleting your data when you first hear about the company shutting down? or is that too easy?
I actually like that idea. Wanna start a business on that? ;)
I can only see one reason why people would use remote storage: "because it's cool! See, I have a drive letter mapped to a server in Hong Kong! 133t!"
And the control thing. The Powers That Be see the PC as an object that gives people much more power than they'd like it to. So they push "solutions" that put users back in a state of dependency. Evil.
Even though they who keep their money in mattresses are a bit strange, because the banks do not provide the money, they are still free to do this. Imagine if all the software in the world was ASP-ed.
I agree that ASPs have a ways to go and that someday they may be more viable, but the worry is that software providers will switch to an ASP system before its ready and force their customers to move or be left behind.
Using your comparison, it would be like the banks owning the currency, leaving people who don't use them to barter with goods.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
As for data, not all of the data would have any meaning to you anyway. Think of how much data is needed to run most applications, independant of the data its actually doing work upon. You are entitled to any data you sent to your ASP (You should have backed it up when you sent it anyway), and you are entitled to all data which was contracted to be sent back to you on a timely basis. A non-technical example of this would be if you contract me to smelt iron ore for you. You are entitled to any ore I didn't smelt, along with all the iron I did derive from your ore. You are not entitled to the supply of natural gas I have on hand to melt your ore down.
They changed already, but they told, This is the text of a mail I got from them:
Dear kilroy_hau:
As a registered i-drive account holder, you are receiving this email to inform you that your i-drive account, kilroy_hau, will no longer be accessible after June 18, 2001.
After June 18th, the i-drive online file storage service will no longer be available through our Web site - www.idrive.com. Instead, i-drive is licensing the software that powers i-drive.com to telecommunications carriers and Internet Service Providers worldwide, so that they can provide their customers with storage services that are fully integrated with their other offerings.
You will have until June 18th to remove your files from your i-drive. After June 18th, you will no longer be able to access your i-drive account or retrieve your files.
Kilroy was here!
I know the end of the "free web" is going to hurt for a lot of people that take advantage of such services, but with a pay service you will hopefully get a more stable, workable service. One positive point about having to PAY for web services is that consumers will have more recourse when something goes wrong. Obviously, that's no guarantee the company won't go out of business, but it helps.
I'd feel much more confident about using a service if they charged $3.95 a month rather than free.
IANAL.
I figured one of these days one of these online storage servers would go down, after all, the highlights of their storage often include nothing but kiddie porn and warez.
The way I look at it, one should be very cautious about where they place important data. Do the captialism check.
Are you paying for storage? No? Then the data, while owned by you, is of no particular concern to the people storing it.
Yes? Then you've got legitimate firepower and can contact others for a class-action lawsuit.
I guess the main thing to consider here is that if the service is free, you're going to have a hard time winning a case on legality issues alone.
If you've paid money, that changes the story entirely, and you'll be able to get action immediately.
Once again, IANAL but this is what I have found to be the case. Just look at Iomega's class action lawsuit for the "click-of-death". They shipped faulty drives that would corrupt disks. Where I work we've lost probably a few thousand dollars to paying to retrieve the data off these disks.
So even if you pay for the storage devices you use, a smart company can get around having to worry about what you claim to be *your* data.
Actually, now that I think about it, this story has nothing to do about who owns the data, but whether or not the free hosting companies should be "responsible" for it.
Idrive is shutting down its free service June 18 and licensing the software to telcos and ISPs so they can resell it. Or you can sign up for something called Xdrive for $4.95/mo.
Or you can just say the hell with all that crap I've got stored and let it go and be really free.
I know that on /. I'm probably preaching to the choir, but this Microsoft Subscription software model (which is very similar to what Dan Gillmor was discussing) ought to scare the daylights out of a lot of businesses. Microsoft has shown repeatedly that they have no qualms about pulling the sort of underhanded tactics that would have made a Borgia pope blush. And businesses are going to trust them to serve apps to them via the internet? God, I feel sorry for any businesses that are foolish enough to buy into that vision of the world.
Onorio Catenacci
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"And that's the world in a nutshell -- an appropriate receptacle."
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"And that's the world in a nutshell -- an appropriate receptacle."
-- Stan Dunn
I am a Director for a company http://www.ntwks.com that designs, constructs and manages all the e-business systems for a Fortune 500 company. We get about 500 million hits, 5 million unique users, and over 300 million in revenue.
What's the secret? No overkill. Most ASPs try and build the biggest, bestest infrastructure possible. In doing so they forget what really provides value in the space: "Solutions".
An ASP is not a technical fix, it is a consulting company with a hosting company partner and a maintainence agreement. If more ASPs focused on doing quick, lighter weight work without all the huge upfront investments this industry would be more successful. If you focus on client value...the rest is easy.
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
It's our responsibility as citizens to insure that our legislators are making informed decisions rather than selling our rights down the river for decades to come...
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Well, I'll not argue that hiring an ASP with a well writen contract is a Good Idea(tm) for a company.
.Net's achiles heel...
Back in the old days when computer were big and expensive, it was usual for small and medium sized companies to rely on service bureaus to procces their data. At that time data was collected by terminals and proccessed on mainframes.
In the '80s micro and mini-computers became small and cheap enough for small and medium companies to afford, and the proccessing started to take place in the local.
But now the size of files grown significantly, and outsorcing storage and proccessing is a Good Idea(tm) again. But the same thing thing that makes ans ASP good to a business make it a not-so-good idea to a home user: the size of the files.
Have you ever tried to upload/download a 45 megs mpeg file ?
Even with cable modem, downloading from a fast server it can take 1 hour. Now imagine this with dial-up.
A compny (even a small one) has more chances to afford a dedicated high speed frame-relay or T1 to upload/dowload the data to the ASP than a home user.
I would hate to upload a 2 meg Word doc to Hailstorm with a V.90 modem, and this can be
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What ? Me, worry ?
The simplest is that using an ASP turns capital investment dollars into expense dollars. Capital investment has to be depreciated on taxes over a period of several years. Which in the case of software is long past its usable life span. Exepense dollars come off of your taxes this year.
Also, sharing the services of a set of experts whose only business is providing a specific service is much cheaper than trying to duplicate those experts inside your company. This is especially true for small businesses. Very few small businesses print their own pay checks. That service has been contracted out for decades. ASPs make it possible to subcontract out even more services. WONDERFUL!
Of course, if you bet your business on a free service, well... you deserve whatever happens to you. You get what you pay for. Trust is an absolute requirement in an ASP relationship. That is one reason why the telecos have been getting into the ASP business. They have such a reputation of trust with customers (hard to believe, but true) that they have a big edge over other ASPs. Not to mention, they are big enough (10s of billions in revenue per year) and have been around long enough (100 years or so) that people beleive them when they say they'll be around to continue providing the service.
StoneWolf
Online storage belongs to them. That's what you give up for the convenience of storing your data on THEIR servers. Want your own app and your own data? Use your own servers.
I think it's just because the ASP industry is like the banking industry before a lot of standards were developed
No, the reason that you don't have to worry about money in the bank is because it's insured by the FDIC for you. Regulations help to a degree, but banks still do go out of business. The only difference is that the FDIC gives you back whatever you had in that bank.
Any reasonably run business should have insurance to cover their own asses, so if, say, your ASP goes under and takes all of your data with them, you still have insurance to at least help you close up your business and pay off your debts, or try to recover in some way from that compensation. Or, you can look for an ASP that's independently insured and you and hope that'll cover you in case anything happens.
robp
All of your arguments -- which I agree with, BTW, simply reinforce my point, which is that the ASP model has not been reduced to practice yet as has happened in banking.
I'm not saying these aren't problems TODAY. I just think that there will come some future point in time -- 5 years, 10 years, I don't know when -- when we'll see models like this be the norm instead of the exception.
Is data any different than money? Right now, keeping your data at an ASP is risky and everyone says that in-house hosting is the only way to go. I think it's just because the ASP industry is like the banking industry before a lot of standards were developed. In 10 years, will we look at people who keep their own servers and infrastructure as the crazy ones? Why are they taking the risk of uptime, backup/recovery, non-redundant net connection, power failure, correct server configuration/patches upon themselves?
Current problems, like being involuntarily upgraded, will find solutions even as the banks found solutions to the problems of bank robbers and (later) interstate branch banking. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Actually, most banks in 1800 were reasonably reliable, because most people lived in small towns and their banker was someone they knew from childhood and had good reason to trust. Also, in a small town you rip off one customer and soon you'll have no customers. But there were enough fools who couldn't figure out who to trust to make a few crooked bankers enormously rich, even if they had to leave town immediately afterwards, and there were many more bankers that were honest but stupid and lost their customers' money along with their own... But now, you can walk into a bank and hand your money to a total stranger, without even checking the financial condition of the bank, and be pretty confident about getting your money back. But the reason for that isn't that the _banks_ found solutions, it is that the legislatures imposed very heavy regulations on the banks. There are strict limits to how much risk the banks can take. Their books are kept in very specific ways. Inspectors from both the state and the federal government (if the bank is federally insured) will come in and check the books. People go to jail if the regulations aren't followed...
It's pretty hard to imagine software thriving in an atmosphere like that. Legislators understand money pretty well, but are clueless about technical issues. Even if they understood, they couldn't change the laws fast enough to keep up with technology that changes significantly even while the legislature is in session, but banks still do pretty much the same thing they did 200 years ago -- they just use computers and phone lines to do it faster.
Its funny that I keep reading these "ASP Nighmare" stories when I just completed a class whose senior project was examining an ASP and it's industry. The overwhelming conclusion of the class was despite the 1999 Gartner projections of grandeur and wealth for this 'new and exciting' ASP market, you don't control the applications and you don't control the data.
.com consolidation.
The ASP market is limited by a number of factors. You need smaller-ish companies that don't have the inclination/capitol to support their own applications. You need also companies that don't value their own privacy or that trust their ASP like a family member.
The ASP market is overblown and its somewhat shocking that people are writing articles to the effect of "X Company held all of my apps and data. Now X is gone, and I didn't take these matters into consideration." Think of this as more
And I can see little reason why anyone should use it for their business. Having your HR, email, accounting run by complete strangers leaves your company wide open to all sorts of disasters. HR records may go astray, email may get broken into (remember yahoo, hotmail anyone?), and what do you tell IRS when it's time to file the taxes, and the ASP's server has crashed, and they did not do proper backups, and you've signed contracts saying that any damages is limited to the ASP's fees.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Dan Gillmor says:
It was overhaul time last weekend at MSN Communities, the message-board area of the Microsoft Network. The online forums disappeared from the Web for more than a day and then resurfaced with a somewhat different look and feel, annoying many of the volunteers who run the forums.
As opposed to when any other web site changes it's layout? People deal with this all the time. If slashdot were to change it's layout, you'd have to suck it up and deal. No one would be screaming anything about ASPs.
If the company you bought that widget from decides to no longer support widgets...well, nothing you can do about it. Still nothing to do with ASPs. We deal with stuff like this everyday.
Another quote: In this context, you can see that the entertainment industry's savage war against Napster and other file-sharing products is more than just opposition to unauthorized copying. It's an attack on technology itself -- on hardware and/or software that gives power to people at the network's edges.
Danny seems to have forgotten that Napster required you to upgrade to the newest version to connect to their servers, and Napster was, in the end, a service provider.
Bringing these ideas regarding HailStorm, or ASPs in general, is a valid point, but I think it's horribly muted out by the sheer noise in the article.
.. and I'm upset that they didn't give me more time to prepare for them to go out of business.
Anyone who lets someone else keep their data is nuts. Anyone who lets someone who runs a free website keep their data deserves to lose it.
Anyone who cries when a free website is changed and they are not notified is an idiot
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
"...he also points out that MSN doesn't charge users for its forums. (MySpace, before its demise, also was a no-charge service.)"
.Net will be subscription based right? Am I wrong? I wouldn't put it past M$ to add a clause into the legal spam about reserving the right to change/copy/delete anything anytime.
Now if those same poeple where paying MySpace.com for the service, I'm sure a class action lawsuit would have formed. On that note I don't think MySpace.com would have just up and quit leaving so many people pissed off.
M$ will do that same thing with any free service they provide.
-IO
And what will you do when those CDRs begin to degrade over time?
What were you expecting?
I guess that burning CDs is not so expensive as it was some years ago, so.. why send your data to anyone when you can back it up and store it in any shelf at home or office. This applies even more when it is importan data, not just the jpgs of your dog pooping your shoes. You have to be a complete idiot to trust in a FREE data storage service.. no one does anyone for free, and the most likely thing is that your data will be checked and watched and looked over by many.. many many people. I myself just will keep burning CDs or buying a larger hdd
I all western countries the laws of ethics surrounding companies are quite strikt.
If they are going out of business they are obligated to inform all customers and help their customers all they can before they close the door.
In this case this means making sure all customers get their data back.
This is, in fact, the case when you "buy" software. That's what pretty much every modern EULA agreement says -- that's why it's an End User License Agreement, as opposed to simply a receipt. The common usage of "buying" software, I think, is what causes people to repeatedly misunderstand this. You don't buy the software, you buy a license to use it. It's like land: when you think you're buying land, you're actually buying the use rights of that land. It still, in every practical sense, belongs to the government, and they can and will seize it if you, for example, refuse to pay your taxes on it. They can also (via zoning laws) tell you what to do with it even after you've already paid for it.
Is this acceptable or legitimate? Those are two different questions. Under our legal structure it is legitimate, in both cases. Whether it's acceptable has to be answered by each of us for her/himself alone.
I have no problem with ripping off someone I think is overcharging anyway, but then I am (according to one AC, at least) a "gun-toting neo-Nazi anarchist redneck freak." Whether you retire and live as a hermit, or rip off the bastards, or march on Washington with a pitchfork and a torch, that's up to you. The one thing absolutely not worth anyone's time is complaining about the greed of others, because that's built in with the capitalist underpinnings of our economy and nothing can be done about it.
Them's the breaks, unfortunately, and unless we revamp intellectual property laws pretty significantly them's gonna stay the breaks.
-- Robert Bunn, gun-toting neo-Nazi anarchist redneck freak
If you use something controlled by someone else, you have to expect them to put a very high priority on their interests, and a very low one on yours. They will change it if that serves them, or not change it (eg, bug fixes) if that serves them. They will pretend to care about your concerns, but they will only act on them when it makes sense in terms of their concerns.
Everyone who reads SlashDot knows the answer. Free software (but not necessarily "Open Source" - eg, Mozilla). Open standards. Free documentation. Community ownership of knowledge. FreeNet. No one entity controlling the things that everyone uses.
When our SFA ASP went by by, we had it written to the contract that we got the source code and the actual database from them. All we had to do is to build an oracle server and we had everything up and running in about 2 days.