The mad rush
Silicon Valley watchers say sociology as much as technology is needed to explain the rapid rise and fall of the P2P fad.
"The whole P2P hoopla is emblematic of the mad rush to find the next big thing in technology," says Bill Burnham, a venture capitalist with Softbank Venture Capital. Edward Jung, a former top software architect at Microsoft, said P2P boosters were trying to recreate the excitement of Napster by simply transferring Napster-style technology to other areas. But since Napster is more of a social than a technical phenomenon, "a lot of people were led down the primrose path," Jung says.
One of the difficulties in assessing the state of P2P is semantic. Most people define the term as a computing scheme in which information is stored on many PCs, reducing or eliminating the need for a central repository like a Web server. In the market, however, the phrase has come to describe at least three entirely distinct categories of technologies and companies. None of them, though, are playing out quite as well as boosters had once hoped.
The first category is Napster and the Napster clones. Purists, for starters, note that the music service is only partially P2P because it relies on a central database to show which users are sharing music files.
Napster, of course, has well-known legal problems. A new crop of Web sites, such as Lime Wire and BearShare, let users trade free music and other files by using a purely P2P software system known as Gnutella. But it remains to be seen if these companies can escape a record industry crackdown down the road, and if they do, whether they can turn themselves into profitable businesses.
There is another group of Napster-like companies calling themselves "legal Napsters" that say they are trying to heed copyright laws and charge for music swapping. But without free music, it's hard to get anyone to log on.
Flycode, a Napster-like system originally named AppleSoup and unveiled to great fanfare last July, had just a few hundred users logged on Tuesday afternoon, many of them swapping material that was either X-rated, copyrighted or both. "There has to be a value proposition to get P2P members to aggregate, and other than music, people haven't yet identified a good one," says A. Joon Yun of Palo Alto Investors, a venture-capital firm that holds a stake in Flycode.
