Actually, I doubt if information is going to be centralized at all. I think that consumer software will become server-like in nature, you won't have to connect to a central server somewhere to get your information. All you would need to do is to enter/retrieve/erase/modify/process all information at home.
The primary people complaining are the ones who are working in the ISP industry, but actually, I think this trend is going to result in very low costs for ISP access, and that can only be good for consumers.
This is similar to what has happened to the telco industry in the long distance call market. Just like in the ISP business, they all started to compete for customers by driving prices down. And right now, calling to anywhere in the world is at its cheapest for as long as I remember it.
The key really is the size of you ISP business. A couple of million customers can give you a pretty good cash flow even if you are making only a buck per customer. The big ISPs will survive, the smaller players will have to merge with others, and operations will have to be streamlined in order to make the costs really minimal. This will be bad for those working in the industry.
But for us who are customers to these ISPs, we benefit because we actually will pay less.
Any computer has the capapbility to run services that client applications can connect to. For example, software for chat servers running on top of Win98 is out there, game servers are packaged with certain computer games, etc.
What is lacking is a means with which PCs can be allocated FQDNs (fully qualified domain names) that remain constant no matter what IP address is allocated to it. Home PCs connecting to the Internet do so for a short period of time through ISPs that allocate only a temporary IP address to them. I think a bunch of companies are already working on certain services that can solve this problem.
So, actually, P2P problems are resolveable. Whether the average Joe would actually run these services on his home PC is a totally different matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Check this article out in ZDNET.
They will probably package this along with M$ Office, you'll probably have to buy it from M$ afterwards.
Actually, I doubt if information is going to be centralized at all. I think that consumer software will become server-like in nature, you won't have to connect to a central server somewhere to get your information. All you would need to do is to enter/retrieve/erase/modify/process all information at home.
The primary people complaining are the ones who are working in the ISP industry, but actually, I think this trend is going to result in very low costs for ISP access, and that can only be good for consumers. This is similar to what has happened to the telco industry in the long distance call market. Just like in the ISP business, they all started to compete for customers by driving prices down. And right now, calling to anywhere in the world is at its cheapest for as long as I remember it. The key really is the size of you ISP business. A couple of million customers can give you a pretty good cash flow even if you are making only a buck per customer. The big ISPs will survive, the smaller players will have to merge with others, and operations will have to be streamlined in order to make the costs really minimal. This will be bad for those working in the industry. But for us who are customers to these ISPs, we benefit because we actually will pay less.
Any computer has the capapbility to run services that client applications can connect to. For example, software for chat servers running on top of Win98 is out there, game servers are packaged with certain computer games, etc. What is lacking is a means with which PCs can be allocated FQDNs (fully qualified domain names) that remain constant no matter what IP address is allocated to it. Home PCs connecting to the Internet do so for a short period of time through ISPs that allocate only a temporary IP address to them. I think a bunch of companies are already working on certain services that can solve this problem. So, actually, P2P problems are resolveable. Whether the average Joe would actually run these services on his home PC is a totally different matter.