On 1/11/01 11:58 AM, "Adam Rifkin" <adam@KnowNow.com> wrote:
> One of the biggest problems I foresee in a world of Web services will be
> this: you write a service, it becomes popular, and then you have to
> spend lots of time (to figure out how to provide the service in a way
> that scales) and money (to pay for the scaling) supporting that service.
You know the ol' "two types of business people" truism? Those who can make
a company successful, and those who can keep it successful? I wonder if
something similar isn't in fact the case here -- maybe Adam just needed a
partner, someone to manage everything involved in keeping an app up that
wasn't just the code work. Admittedly, that seems to be moving out of the
realm of personal projecting... Would be nice if there were a support system
for Web apps trapped somewhere between being pet projects and full-out small
businesses.
> Actually, support includes not only the cost of scaling but also the
> cost of debugging, improving, and maintaining the service itself.
> Right now there's no company out there that can ease the burden of the
> time and money needed to support a service. That will have to change.
So I've been wondering why no form of "shareservice" has been made available
anywhere on the Web (if it's been made available? Anybody seen anything
along these lines?) It would be nice to see Kagi (http://www.kagi.com/)
step up to the plate on this one, since they're so successful in the
shareware world. On Macs, anyway -- I don't have a lot of experience with
PC shareware. Admittedly, they don't do customer support services, but they
do appear to significantly reduce the amount of complexity involved in
managing the financial aspects. And tacking on an aggregated, Web-based
customer support system for shareservices might be a real possibility,
especially if the SOAP era ever takes off. Though you'd probably have to
run the numbers to see if it would *ever* actually make a profit at that
level. Still, that would just leave "debugging, improving, and maintaining"
for the creator to do -- and that's the fun part, right? :)
Sigh. Most of this is 'cause I'm really sorry that I'm not going to get to
use Organizine.
l
-- lanebecker lane@monstro.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:18:25 PDT