Comment Articles

Napster could wind up putting the kibosh on P2P

Charles Cooper AnchorDesk

Published: 15 Feb 2001 17:13 GMT

Fallout from the Napster saga is making it that much more difficult for P2P companies to break the ice with Corporate America.

The paradox is that Napster isn't even a pure P2P play, although it nonetheless continues to serve as the poster child for what's considered in the popular mind to be a renegade technology.

There are some 150-plus P2P companies in existence, backed by about $400 million in venture financing, most of it invested in distributed computing and collaboration/knowledge management outfits. These companies have as much to do with Napster or theft as a business proposition as you do with the man on the moon.

Yet, even before the music studios went to court against Napster, there was already anxiety in corporate circles about what P2P technology would mean to IT. There were concerns about security, concerns about protection of intellectual property, and concerns about not flooding available bandwidth -- in a word, concern about control.

IT managers have long known individual employees were smuggling in P2P applications right under their noses, but haven't been able to do much to persuade people in the organization not to download digital music. And after reading and hearing so much about Napster, this wasn't the best of ways to get introduced to the emerging world of P2P.

Call it guilt by association but P2P developers will have to grapple with the fallout of the 'Napster effect' and counter the notion that they are waving the flag of disrespect for the prerogatives -- let alone the wishes -- of the corporation.

Ozzie: It's all about fear
During his days at Lotus and then IBM, Ray Ozzie had first-hand knowledge of the challenge in selling what was then considered a revolutionary software solution to enterprise-level companies. In a similar vein, he argues that developers will need to work just as hard -- if not harder -- at understanding the IT mindset if P2P products are to make similar headway in big accounts. Bluntly, he says, can you really fault IT managers for remaining reluctant to embrace an unknown and still controversial technology?

"You can overcome it if you communicate in the right way and have empathy for [IT] needs," Ozzie, now the founder and chief executive of Groove Networks, told a standing-room only crowd Wednesday morning in San Francisco.