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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (173524)	3/13/2003 4:12:21 PM
From: tcmay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

" I think the reason there is no killer app currently is because there is not enough software development due to 2 factors. One is cost- software development costs too high, not enough projects- this is related to whether software R&D is based in india or US or whereever. Second is overregulation, this is the napster scenario. My feeling is that napster was a killer app that was halted due to regulation not cost of development. We have a few cases like that, IP type issues with online voting and other stuff." I disagree completely. Most outstanding software ("killer apps") gets developed by a very small team, often just one or two people. Then it gets refined, tweaked, made more complex, degraded, etc. by the hordes of cubicle dwellers. Examples of this abound, and I listed a bunch of them in my post. The first browsers, e.g., Mosaic, were very small efforts, the work of a few programmers (and the hundreds of cubicle dwellers Netscape later put into expanding Mosaic into Netscape Navigator did not help it...just the opposite, as bloatware ensued.) Napster was also a very small effort, as all should know. It got very popular very fast, but not because a lot of programmers were adding to it. And why it died was not "overregulation" per se. Napster had a business model that I can sympathize with, but one which was doomed from the start to fail: "We will help you pirate music!" Had Napster been located in a foreign jurisdiction, it _might_have lasted longer (as the Ninth Circuit could not so easily enjoin it). But it ultimately would have failed, just as so many of its sister companies went bust, got enjoined, failed. (I know a bunch of the folks connected with Napster, Bit Torrent, FreeNet, Kazaa, etc. And if you look at the book on Peer-to-Peer Networking, you'll find references to my own Blacknet project from 1992-93, perhaps the first untraceable code-trading system.) Had Napster operated in cypherspace, untraceable to regulators and judges in the Ninth Circuit, it might still exist today. But of course with more complexity for the users, and hence less popularity. In any case, the next Napster or PageMaker or Mosaic will very likely come from the cleverness of a Bob Frankston or Marc Andreesen, not several hundred spaghetti code writers in Bangalore. --Tim May