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It's hard for me to believe that push technology is going to revolutionize the internet. Why? Because it didn't happen last time (or the time before that). Fro
by mrshoe 17y ago
It's hard for me to believe that push technology is going to revolutionize the internet. Why? Because it didn't happen last time (or the time before that).
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom):
The PointCast Network used push technology, which
was a hot concept at the time, and received enormous
press coverage when it launched in beta form on
February 13, 1996.
Since the early days of the web, people have recognized that the pull model has serious limitations. Unfortunately, pushing data to users has never been compelling enough to spark anything that qualifies as a revolution. People really want data to be pushed to them if that data is intended specifically for them (e.g. email and IM), but not if it's general weather and news data.
I do love Cuban's honesty, though:
Would NY Times online readers pay $1 a month to be
guaranteed that they get their news first, before
anyone else? I dont know.
Most people would claim to be able to predict the future in order to make their point. He doesn't.
EDIT: I should add that his idea that "Huge databases can talk to huge databases and exchange data more efficiently" is cool and makes much more sense than pushing data to users. We're actually working on something along those lines right now...
- tptacek 17y agoI'm not sure I see the connection between AOL implemented in a screensaver and a new design idiom for web applications.
- mrshoe 17y agoMany of us probably don't remember these early days of the web, but a lot of companies were founded (and acquired) because they were going to be part of the impending "push technology" revolution. PointCast is just the poster child for that movement which never really made any big waves.
- tptacek 17y agoI guess my point is, "push" meant something different then.
- dasil003 17y agoMaybe the idea was just before its time. In the era of the lightweight REST API I think there is a much greater chance of success.
- sfphotoarts 17y agoI worked for Pointcast :) The data was specifically for the individual, you could customize the data you were pushed using the client. It wasn't just a screensaver. That wikipedia pages misses a lot of the fun back then. Dave Dorman was a really bad choice of CEO, he didn't even have a computer and his first priority seemed to be picking the type of Walnut to have his personal carpenter make his desk from. Ah, the good old days of spending $80m...
- mrshoe 17y agoVery cool! It must have been fun to watch that all play out first hand. I was in High School still, unfortunately. I was definitely a PointCast user, though. Although it didn't turn out to be revolutionary, I certainly found it useful.
- sfphotoarts 17y agoIt was fun, except, had the board (Chris mostly) accepted the offer of $450m then I would not have had to work any longer. Alas. I also turned down an offer to join Nutscrape way back too. All fabulous examples of great career choices I've made... The thing that probably had the biggest negative impact was rewriting the client in COM (who remembers that?), this gave us absolutely no new features and bogged down client development for six months, meanwhile portals became the new hotness. There were some interesting developer issues that we tackled back then, like using the i/o completion ports model (rather than the more traditional BSD sockets model). Since the servers were all NT the i/o completion ports made the code hard to debug but resulted in very high performance. I think (if memory serves) MSFT got that from their VMS roots. Some of the kernel guys on NT were bigshots at DEC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vax780_small.jpeg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vax780_small.jpeg)
- initself 17y agoUgh, this sounds like a very very bad dream.
- sown 17y ago