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Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology! |
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22-10-05, 02:11 AM | #1 | ||
Madame Comrade
Join Date: May 2000
Location: Area 25
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Napster's business lessons - plus a few lessons of non-commercial nature
Napster's business lessons - plus a few lessons of non-commercial nature
Sources: C|Net story Don Dodge's blog Don Dodge, Napster's former VP from its wild early days, has written to C|Net an interesting story about his insider experiences within the company during the time it was simultaneously enjoying huge popularity as the meeting place for all music lovers of the planet and being fiercely attacked by the RIAA. He accounts the same story even more personally and interestingly in his blog. He sums up his personal business lessons into these points: Quote:
Napster's smallness as a company also prevented it from establishing a stable and committed customer base that might have turned profitable at some point in the future when the company would have figured out a working business model for all that feverish filesharing activity and the all-time social gathering it was hosting. It had gained millions of enthusiastic customers in record time but these customers made it clear early on that they would not pay for the software, for the service or for the content that they provided themselves, nor would they tolerate any filtering or censorship on sharing. So the profit method would have to be something else, something more indirect. I suppose they could have come up with some useful ideas later on but they ran out of time long before that. If you want to keep millions of customers happy and committed to your service, you need preferably hundreds and at minimum dozens of customer service professionals to make it work. Enthusiastic self-assigned volunteers stepped in to help with customer support, just as other inspired volunteers stepped in to virally market the service and thus save the company from all marketing costs. That sort of community based strategy might have even worked had it been properly organized, supported and coordinated. The company never did any serious moves into that direction though, and being left on their own these often active and talented volunteers naturally grew loyal to each other, distancing themselves from the weird non-communicative company. One by one they started to embrace the free p2p agenda where they could take their fate and activities into their own hands, thanks to the emerging open source p2p software. Dodge concludes his blog entry: Quote:
During its short and stormy life Napster managed to demonstrate to millions around the planet the dramatic benefits that non-commercial social networking on Internet can provide when the software is powerful enough to provide each participant global visibility, global reach, tools for unrestricted sharing and searching plus elementary social tools like browsing, IMs and chatrooms to make social life possible. This is all the technology needed to enable spontaneous growth of fascinating, diverse and deep content pools where new interesting works and artists can be discovered anytime through active searching, random browsing or peer recommendations. This is also all the technology needed to set up a virtual social playground where likeminded people can find each other regardless of their geographical locations, ideologies or social statuses, where they can enjoy each other's personal tastes and personal libraries, to chat and make friends with each other. And it soon became obvious that all this good stuff could be provided effectively for free, if not by commercial ventures then by open software developers who (led by the charming Justin Franklin) had already started to work on fully decentralized technology requiring no hardware, bandwidth or personnel investments to keep the network running. Napster's impressive technological demonstration and the following collective realization of how much we could already do on our own, with no contributions or assistance whatsoever from old copyright businesses, official institutions or government authorities, was a crucial, paradigm-changing one. Technology had swiftly and almost without warning evolved to a point where we private citizens were suddenly empowered with industrial class distribution powers and could therefore see for ourselves that all the digital fruits of culture, commercial or not, could be efficiently and economically kept available and delivered to whoever happened to need them anywhere on the planet. In other words we had suddenly been given both the means and the know-how to move the majority of world population over to a new era of cultural abundance - with virtually zero costs. This realization of sudden and dramatic consumer empowerment hasn't gone anywhere, and it won't, as it is based on solid technical reality. We cannot avoid the obvious logical question: if we already have a superior free technology to give us a superior cultural infrastructure, why the hell are we still wasting precious time and our hard earned money to fill the pockets of copyright cartels whose technical services we don't need anymore and whose greed-driven corporate agendas make them irresponsible and often harmful guardians for our culture? While Napster was being developed, Groove, another early p2p startup, was also poised to make a technological breakthrough by developing a p2p based virtual office environment for business customers. Being a much more solid and better resourced company with a straightforward business idea Groove fulfilled its venture capitalist agenda perfectly, their independent story ending into a succesful sale to Microsoft. But Groove was never to cause any revolution á la Napster - it was just innovative software business as usual. Revolutions need the passion and the momentum of the masses to fuel them, and Shawn Fanning just happened to find the magic formula that would first excite the masses and then start a revolution that would go much further than Shawn himself or his venture capitalist pals could ever have imagined. - tg |
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