The Cole Papers, Push, April 1997

Get to the point (top): The
PointCast 'push' system includes an
application that allows the user to
display the information type desired.
Here, stock market information for
Apple Computer is on the screen.

Screensaver publishing (bottom): Berkeley Systems' AfterDark Online works only as a screensaver product. Here the information of USA Today is displayed.

An attempt to pull all the facts out of the push debate

Hey! Are you just getting good and comfortable with that World-Wide Web thing?

Sorry -- we're done with that now.

But wait! No need to panic. In fact, you may just love this plan.

Now remember, everything is new and wonderful here in the Information Age, and we invent everything from scratch. Can't have any old ideas around here, no, sir.

So one day, some of these revolutionary thinkers are sitting around grousing about how the World-Wide Wait was clogging all existing and projected TCP/IP plumbing until Capt. Kirk gets here to straighten things out. This meant some of their deathless multimedia content was going unseen by the great unwashed.

Wait a minute -- what if we put together a publication and delivered it to the users, so it would be sitting there ready for them when they wanted it?

Ooo, stop the presses.

Now, we know what you're thinking right now: "Hey! We can do that."

Yes, you can. The newspaper industry has had this push thing down for only a couple of hundred years now. Still, before we get too excited, we ought to look at exactly how all this works.

The World-Wide Web is dying. The Web was a transitional technology, and it's just about gone now.

Why? The Web was designed to distribute documents among a few scientists. Using it across the 'Net violated all the latter's founding design principles.

The 'Net was designed as a distributed computing environment. There is no central point or main artery, and this is by design. Data take the best available route -- the 'Net routes around damage, congestion and other trouble.

Take e-mail, for example. A friend on the other side of the globe sends you a huge e-mail, complete with an attached binary data file.

Your friend deals directly with a local server. The e-mail then travels the most efficient route possible, routing around congestion and outages. When you log in, it's waiting for you on your local server.

Because you and your friend both worked with your local servers, there is an opportunity to balance the workload. After all, your provider has a pretty good idea how many customers it has and how much equipment is needed to support them. (If your 'Net provider can't figure this out, find another.)

The important thing here is that the journey between servers took place while neither of you was on-line.

Compare that with the Web, which requires repeatedly opening and holding a specific route across the 'Net.

The first problem with this plan is obvious: It causes the same type of peak-use traffic jams that we Right Coasters all have come to know and love on the Long Island Expressway and the Washington Beltway.

The second problem falls into the category of teaching a pig to sing -- it wastes your time and it annoys the pig. The Web was designed to share text documents quickly and easily among scientists riding a high-speed network. Now it's used primarily to ship documents festooned with animations, WAV files and graphics of every description to users connected over slow dial-up lines.

Of course, this creates performance that resembles the flow of molasses in winter. Less obviously, it causes continual failures. Since a web transfer creates a path between a single specific client and server, any interruption along that route -- a busy Domain Name Services server, a clogged router -- will cause the connection to fail.

There's much, much more, but you get the idea: No wonder it's called the World-Wide Wait.

Now, new technologies are sending the Web off to join Gopher in the digital attic. These are called "push" systems; they work on the e-mail principle of moving things to you over the best available route.

Happier readers
These new systems are designed to do a couple of things.

Primarily, they make reading a happier experience because the content is read off a local hard drive -- that's fast -- rather than over an active 'Net connection, which is slow.

There are a couple of ways to do this:

The first isn't really a push system at all. Basically, it's an off-hours pull. The browser is set up to download user-selected sites at, oh, 4 a.m. Then the user zips through them off the hard drive at 8 a.m.

It's a fast design that uses existing technology, but there's no provision for delivering, say, breaking news.

Next are systems that make use of electronic mail to deliver HyperText Markup Language documents to the user. Netscape is developing such a system. You still need to establish a 'Net connection to get this stuff, but you access the content off your local server.

Then there are systems that use a modified web engine to deliver content, rather than serve it up. There's no technical reason why web connections must be initiated by the browser. Systems such as PointCast deliver a stream of content to clients set up to receive it if they are on.

Think television set.

Finally there are systems that abandon the Web entirely, such as Marimba's Java-based Castinet. These have the advantage of being unfettered by the bad design baggage of the Web. On the other hand, they lack the Web's installed base.

So where's Microsoft in all this?

As usual, the Goliath From Redmond is in position to win, this time by using a statistically unarguable strategy: If you bet on every horse in the race, then your horse wins.

Microsoft is capitalizing on the weakness cited in the last plan -- by definition, if you abandon the Web, you abandon the Web's installed base. Since there's no money in browsers -- partly because the focus traditionally switches from client to server as network systems mature, and mostly because Microsoft's current strategy can be summed up as "If Netscape sells it, we give it away for free" -- building and supporting clients is remarkably unattractive to these companies.

Microsoft to the rescue.

The Softies' new Active Desktop technology features something called the Channel Definition Format. If your server software adheres to the CDF, then voila! You already have a client in the Windows 97 operating system (which, per usual Microsoft practice, should arrive in 1998).

Microsoft announced CDF at Internet World in March, and everyone who was anyone but Netscape immediately jumped on the bandwagon. The Day One list of those announcing CDF products or Microsoft alliances included America Online, CompuServe, PointCast, BackWeb, AirMedia, Starwave, HotWired and Ziff-Davis.

We get it
But, hey -- we get it, remember? We've already decided we're going to be Information Companies, Rulers of the Information Age.

We have only one problem: Which of all these new push technologies is the right one?

Fortunately, there's a simple, clear answer: Who cares?

We're not in the technology business. We're in the information business. It's our job to get information, package it, then deliver it any way our customers want.

Instead of saying "no," we must learn to say, "We do that."

As in: "I want my news delivered by fax."

"We do that."

Or: "I want my news on my laptop when I leave for work."

"We do that."

And: "I want my favorite four sections printed and on my breakfast table."

"We do that."

The details are unimportant to our industry. Take the last example. Do we really care if that breakfast paper is printed on a Goss Colorliner and trucked to the customer's house, or printed on an inkjet printer we give for free to anyone who buys an annual subscription?

The last may sound like insanity in a discussion of new media -- but it isn't. Good inkjet printers now retail for under $150. What does that delivered copy cost you now annually in newsprint, ink, labor, transportation. ...

All this doesn't mean that pull technologies are going to go away. There needs to be a mix, of course -- publications delivered to you, and the ability to surf on the spur of the moment.

All the new technologies permit this.

Microsoft's Active Desktop combines all these technologies into one huge -- ummm -- mess. Push "channels" appear as configurable slices of the desktop -- you can have PointCast, AfterDark, BackWeb and similar push technologies all running at the same time. Plus, you can still go surfing, just as with current browsers.

Marimba's software is even more advanced because it is not limited to the weaknesses of HyperText Markup Language or HyperText Transfer Protocol. Castinet can deliver software upgrades, Java applets and just about anything else that can run on a computer. And since the technology is based on the cross-platform Java programming language, the channels can be picked up on any platform.

Indirect competition
New media products have forced newspapers into head-to-head competition for the first time in generations.

Newspapers have gotten used to indirect competition -- competing for ad dollars with other media, such as television and direct mail. But in this country, daily newspapers for the most part are monopolies -- one to a city, or a couple under a JOA.

New media have brought back '20s style head-to-head competition -- I do exactly what you do, and I'm going to kick your butt.

Newspapers -- whose motto for the last three generations has been "We have a Goss Metroliner; you don't" -- are finding this difficult. Just about every newspaper you can name has rushed onto the Web. That's great if you're busy staking out a place; not so great if you're intent on making money right now.

But newspapers have no choice if they intend to survive. Microsoft is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into building on-line content; perhaps most alarming is that it's taken an especial shine to classified ads. (Check out the Microsoft CarPoint site, a service that provides searchable, daily used car listings from car dealers.)

That holds true for push technologies. Frankly, none is ready for prime time. The main component in Microsoft's Active Desktop offering, for example -- Internet Explorer 4.0 -- is currently available only as a fairly buggy (though impressive) beta.

And the rest of it -- Windows 97 -- was postponed in March. Microsoft told computer manufacturers that it will not be available on machines shipped during the '97 Christmas buying season.

That said, you ought to be in the game.

You can wait -- but the market won't.

-- Christopher J. Feola

BackWeb Technologies,
(408) 437-0200;
Berkeley Systems Inc.,
(510) 540-5535;
Marimba Inc.,
(415) 328-5282,
e-mail: info@marimba.com;
Microsoft Corp.,
(206) 882-8080;
Netscape Communications Corp.,
(415) 528-2619,
e-mail: info@netscape.com.

An attempt to pull all the facts out of the push debate

From THE COLE PAPERS, April 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.