it's the tail wagging the dog with these guys. each day p2p gets you in their door is a day they hope you'll drop some real cash on gambling, porn, web portal services, hosting - you name it, the stuff they have that makes money. doesn't mean it's spyware or hijackware or even necessarily bad, but it does indicate a maturing p2p market and one we’re not accustomed to.
in the us and most of the west the normal p2p economic models were never allowed to develop. the lawsuits and the courts saw to that. they were killed in the cradle. so we've grown comfortable in this never never land of no costs and no commercials, especially users who take advantage of the cleaned clients and winmx, soulseek, bt, emule etc. investors hung back in a waiting mode and are still killing time in spite of the grokster decision, but economics hates a vacuum and somewhere somebody's going to figure out how to squeeze cash from this file sharing phenom.
for these es 5 guys it may be that p2p is just a big lure that brings customers into their store – nothing more. sure the better the app the more trade it brings in but the focus may be on something else, something non p2p. it might work. from what i’ve heard they’re not all that happy with the staus quo, they want to shake things up and they sound way to ambitious to settle for a peer-to-peer. i mean really, 68 full time programmers for a file sharing app? i don’t think so. they’ve got to be cooking up a lot of other dishes.
it sounds to me like they’re trying to put together another giant, like maybe an adult version of aol. p2p may be just an extra value piece of a soon to be very big puzzle - and something to keep es 5 customer turnover lower than that of their real competitors, like aol, everyday, yahoo, msn, netzero, earthlink…
it goes again to the heart of the west’s misguided technology policies and how irresponsible politicians are willing to prop up dying industries while the future of IT moves offshore. it’s an outrage. doubly so in the states when the dying industries being supported aren’t even american.
- js.
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