From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Fri Jul 28 2000 - 12:14:50 PDT
On Fri, 28 Jul 2000, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote:
> Napster hasn't gone public either, making it difficult to appraise the
> company's value. David Boies, Napster's attorney, told The
> Associated Press in an interview this week that the company
> believes it is worth somewhere between $800 million and $1.5
> billion.
And here we have the deeper problem that is the real reason
business-types are freaking out. They got stopped before they could IPO.
If the lawyers of the old, slow, traditional businesses have learned to
react faster then the VC's can push through an IPO... oh oh.
With no IPO the company is worth 30x earnings (even if negative, hehe),
not a few billion, and has to actually make profits, and that's just not
fun. Gnutella and freenet have noone to sue, but "worse", for the same
reason they have noone to IPO and make money.
> Lightshare plans to make its money from transaction fees charged
> for its monitoring system to track peer-to-peer sales.
That's no more P2P then Napster. _True_ P2P is a distributorless
proposition because the users run the show, the whole point is to remove
the middlemen. To make money you have to have some sort of control and
accounting, which means something has to be centrally run.
Bits will be sold direct from producer to consumer, and the transport
will be "grab the bits where you can". Which means Stephen King can
still make money, but a "P2P company" is nowhere in the picture.
> Venture capitalists are intrigued by the peer-to-peer concept.
I rest my case :)
- Adam L. Beberg
Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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