Clarification re Shakeout piece

Thursday, April 5, 2001 by Dave Winer.

Pushback 

In re my previous piece, Chris Kwak, an analyst at Bear Stearns asks "Is decentralization is over too?"

Gene Kan, the lead developer of Infrasearch, the P2P company recently acquired by Sun writes: "Anyone on the 'curve' knew that P2P was no more a business model than content-community or, more appropriately, client-server. In my mind, the true golden age of P2P is yet to come. Prior uses of the idea were necessarily limited by resource scarcity.

"Now 'computing resources' (MIPS, HDD, bps) are widespread, to say the least. That changes things and makes well-connected resources tractable, usable and useful. Napster, for example, would have been impossible and unusable not long ago. Don't let the rush obscure the gold."

Clarification 

This is good pushback. I should have been more clear in my piece. It's the opportunism that is over, the work still remains. Decentralization is a very powerful development model, we use it at UserLand, and encourage others to do so as well. Taking advantage of unused CPU bandwidth, disk storage, and underutilized connectivity are big technological opportunities, as Kan says, with lots of gold.

Dave