I'm sure some of you knew about this already... The rest of you may
recognize some company names:
http://www.gomez.com/features/article.asp?topcat_id=0&col=16&id=7020&subSect
=finance
The Two-Way Internet
18 January 2001
by: John Robb
The Internet is undergoing a transformation to a new system that scales
better, costs less and provides better end-user performance than the Web.
Gomez calls this new system the 2X (two-way) Internet.
We believe the arrival of the 2X Internet is as momentous an occasion as
the arrival of the Web and is what’s necessary to achieve global customer
adoption of the Internet as a means of doing business. Here are
characteristics of the 2X Internet.
Local. The 2X Internet relies on the ability of desktop PCs to do much of
the work necessary to actually assemble and serve a complex Web site.
Contrast this with how the Web squanders PC power by only retrieving and
rendering pages that are pre-masticated by large corporate servers.
Global. Rather than interconnect with singular large corporate sites, the
2X Internet will rely on customers to connect to a global network of
servers that run highly distributed applications. In this model, all
interactions are made with local servers that are part of a global network.
No more will customers be forced to interact with services that are time
zones away.
Metered. All interactions on the 2X Internet will be metered, analyzed and
charged to customers. Due to the infrastructure needed and the complexity
of the interactions, business models based on free interactions will be
cast aside in favor of a fee-for-service model.
How The 2X Internet Will Fix The Web
The 2X Internet has the power to transform the mediocre experience of the
Web into a vibrant, rich experience that drives customer adoption of the
Internet as the preferred way of doing business. Here’s what went wrong
with the Web and what the 2X Internet will do to correct it:
It’s slow. Customer productivity drops dramatically when response times are
longer than a second. Times are 7 to 10 seconds on the Web, and structural
issues will prevent all improvement. The 2X Internet speeds response times
by using a server located on the customer’s PC to connect to XML-enabled
data services provided by local servers in the 2X Internet global "cloud."
The short distances traveled and the power of dedicated local resources
will radically improve customer productivity by making interactivity
sub-second.
It’s expensive. Monster clusters of servers and oversized switches costing
tens of millions dollars (with huge staffs to match) run most corporate Web
efforts. By distributing applications and data across a global network of
small, inexpensive servers and allowing the customer’s own desktop PC to
share in the burden of computation, costs drop radically.
It can’t scale. Web sites scale horribly when faced with hundreds of
thousands of users doing complex tasks. By dividing the task of enabling
the transaction over a global network of servers and the PC resources of
millions of customers, the 2X Internet solves the scalability problem.
The 2X Internet Rises
Over the next three years, the infrastructure of the 2X Web will explode
onto the Internet, accompanied by rapidly expanding bandwidth (particularly
in the all-optical core) and plummeting storage costs. It will serve as the
basis for the next great technology companies that will push aside the
aging PC world players and will breathe life into the moribund, financially
strapped, online content world. Here is a taxonomy of the 2X Internet:
Global backbones that provide XML dial tone, desktop servlets and highly
distributed applications will emerge and begin to play the same role to
customers as the telcos did in the pre-Internet world. These backbone
providers will not arise out of the telco or hosting world but will be new
names, such as Neoplat.
New innovative software from companies such as Centrata, Know Now and
Applied MetaComputing will enable independent software vendors to rapidly
develop, globally deploy and easily manage their software. Microsoft will
play a very large part of this revolution too, with its .Net
infrastructure, but it will likely be late to the party and a ferocious
competitor when it arrives.
Applications engineered for the 2X Internet will quickly dominate.
Web-enabled apps will be quickly outgunned in all the major areas of
evaluation: functionality, ease of use, cost and performance by the 2X
Internet apps. Names such as Groove, Userland and Rotor may become
commonplace in the delivery of these services.
Gomez president John Robb has followed Internet technology for as long as
it has existed.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:18:51 PDT