Tim Howell’s Weblog

As Rod reports, IBM is the latest vendor to revitalise the concept of ASPs, making a couple of acquisitions to progress its On Demand strategy. Having been in the ASP business, albeit with limited success, the potential to deliver functional applications over the web has always existed. With the innovation of companies such as Salesforce.com, and the availability of broadband, amongst other things, this potential is starting to be realised.
On paper, ASP-delivered applications should be of interest to smaller organisations which have limited financial and IT resources. The issue is not so much about how much funcitonality is available, but more to do with return on investment and control: organisations need to be assured the financial cost of paying on a month by month or “per click” basis makes sense in the long term, and they need the ability to take things in house or have access to the data, should they desire. The leading ASP, or software as a service, providers are doing this and now becoming genuine competitors to the traditional vendors.
Taking this concept to the next stage, and coupling the investment of IBM with the activities of Google, for example, and it won’t be too long before the desktop is dead.

According to Reuters, earlier this week Google overtook eBay as the biggest Internet company in terms of stock market value after posting strong quarterly earnings. The share price surge resulted in an overall valuation of $56 billion, which was more than eBay’s $52 billion valuation at the time.

Whether this will continue to be the case over the long term is difficult to pick, but eBay has had its challenges recently; after not meeting its financial goals the share price got chopped by 20%, no doubt assisting Google’s valuation catch-up play.

The Business 2.0 blog even went so far as comparing the rise of Internet companies such as eBay with Metcalfe’s Law (where the utility of a network equals the square of the number of users), and wondering whether the fate of these companies would be predicated on the ongoing growth of Internet usage.

In the past couple of years, it appears that all of a sudden the promise of the web has started to be realised. I’ve always been a believer in “interconnectedness” and that there is huge opportunities for devices, web sites, organisations and just about everything with an IP address to be connected in some way shape or form. Convergence forms part of this, with the melding, for example, of phone and PDA functions in a PDA, or television delivered over IP. The web inevitably has a role to play, and it was exciting to read about A9’s “Yellow Pages” which extends Amazon’s A9 search engine with a pseudo Yellow Pages with images – you can effectively “walk down” streets and look at shop frontages for several large US cities.

What’s also interesting is how the service was technically achieved, as reported by Business 2.0: “In short, Manber and co. (urged on by Jeff Bezos, who Manber says was “very involved”) strapped GPS-enabled digital video camera-cum-terabyte server rigs to the top of a bunch of SUVs, then drove them around the commercial areas of major US metropolitan areas, recording what then became composite still pictures of entire cities, one address at a time. A9 took more than 20 million images of 14 million+ businesses across ten cities (more are coming soon), then created a local search application they call Block View.”

For those of us struggling to write complex documents full of buzzwords and jargon, Bullfighter was a useful tool to have in the kitbag. Now it appears Deloitte who originally released it, has abandoned the tool, but the authors of the tool have made it available at www.fightthebull.com.

While we wouldn’t disagree, email has been named as the fifth most important invention of the past 25 years by a panel put together by the Lemelson-MIT Program. Perhaps surprisingly, the email message is considered more important than music CDs, portable computers and DNA fingerprinting. Full details are on CNN.