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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
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.
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.
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
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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
Mmmmm. Configuration Management.
:)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
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!
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?
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
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.
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.
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
---
--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
---
--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
--
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
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
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.
.. 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?
But the owner *does* have the right to have your car removed from *their* property, at your expense, without notifying you. At least that's what it's like here in New Jersey. The drives belong to the storage company. Though I wouldn't argue that it's completely unethical for the company to do something to your data, surely it's not illegal.
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.