On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 01:36:09PM -0500, Meng Weng Wong wrote:
|
| Judging the people who pay you money is not a tidy business model. It
| may be better for a business to focus on providing reputation services
| rather than coupling reputation to certificates.
|
Reputation services were previously described at
http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com/200310/0172.html
The initial versions of such a reputation system are likely to be
commercial. The startup and operating costs need to be paid for.
The technical challenges to the proposed reputation system are not that
difficult. The big cost is in marketing, outreach, publicity, awareness.
I have a theory that of every dollar big companies spend on a fancy
commercial gewgaw, eighty cents go to the salespeople who spent half a
day selling it to them. Because noncommercial opensource lacks this
selling mechanism, "buyers" have to do more work to research the market.
When buyers do that, good products sell themselves. Lots of people
download P2P filesharing apps every day, and they're not hearing about
it from banner ads. When buyers aren't hobbyists, as in large
institutions, salespeople have to do more of the work, and buyers pay a
premium accordingly. Commercial software tends to forge ahead, and free
software tends to follow.
Selling is a full time job. When there's no salary and no commission,
we call it evangelism instead.
In our case, the market is in sender authentication ideas. The people
on this list are, by definition, type 1: we did the work of figuring out
the situation, comparison shopping on the basis of feature sets, and are
happily early-adopting SPF for our own domains. But what about
postmasters at ISPs? Do more of them get their technology news from
reading Slashdot every day, or by being sent to vendor-heavy conferences
and exhibitions three times a year?
Even for the latter crowd, Yahoo's domainkeys is good for SPF, because
they'll spend lots of money getting the concept of sender authentication
out to the audience, and then some portion of the audience will ask
themselves, "hm, is there an easier way to do this?"
So reputation systems are a good business to go into, because the open
community isn't going to do the work of building such a system just yet.
But such a system is infrastructure, and Neal Stephenson's analogy applies:
http://www.spack.org/index.cgi/InTheBeginningWasTheCommandLine#head-b4c87ac384ea375d42b0b742ade5b449fa35f56a
In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life
on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is
trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead
radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort
of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become
free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too
crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's
biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and
what is below.
But it moves a lot faster. In various parts of our world, it is possible
to go and visit rich fossil beds where skeleton lies piled upon
skeleton, recent ones on top and more ancient ones below. In theory they
go all the way back to the first single-celled organisms. And if you use
your imagination a bit, you can understand that, if you hang around long
enough, you'll become fossilized there too, and in time some more
advanced organism will become fossilized on top of you.
The fossil record--the La Brea Tar Pit--of software technology is the
Internet. Anything that shows up there is free for the taking (possibly
illegal, but free). Executives at companies like Microsoft must get used
to the experience--unthinkable in other industries--of throwing millions
of dollars into the development of new technologies, such as Web
browsers, and then seeing the same or equivalent software show up on the
Internet two years, or a year, or even just a few months, later.
By continuing to develop new technologies and add features onto their
products they can keep one step ahead of the fossilization process, but
on certain days they must feel like mammoths caught at La Brea, using
all their energies to pull their feet, over and over again, out of the
sucking hot tar that wants to cover and envelop them.
So here we have an argument that a reputation business will eventually
defer to an open, cooperative, nonprofit system.
I should just stop here and say that I think there is a world market for
maybe five email sender reputation services.
:)
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