Blogarithms
Doug Kaye's thoughts on web services, web hosting and managed services.
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SSAC Shuts Down. In early January, "the Strategic Sourcing Advisory Council, formerly the MSP Association, announced that it was ceasing operations....There was much hype about the management service providers (MSP), and the reality didn’t turn out as lucrative as many service providers, investors and vendors had hoped...The mistake of some prognosticators was that they assumed this was a new paradigm that would take over a majority of IT management, when the more reasonable assumption was that it would be used selectively and as a supplement to IT." [Source: NetworkWorld Fusion]
Posted Wednesday, January 22, 2003 6:35:48 PM 
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Everyone's Internet Buys Hosting Tech. "Internet service provider Everyone's Internet said on Wednesday that it has struck a deal to acquire the assets of Web hosting industry trade publication Hosting Tech magazine, which last week announced that it would cease publication." [Source: The Web Host Industry Review]
This saves a good magazine, but I wonder how many of the good writers will remain with the magazine.
Posted Wednesday, January 22, 2003 5:45:24 PM
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Micropayments for Web Services? Russ Jones of Glenbrook Partners (with a lot of first-hand experience) takes aim at micropayments. "To say we're skeptical about micropayments would be an understatement."
But to date, most micropayment systems have been used with the delivery of content (not services) over the World Wide Web. They have been based on the assumption that consumers would pay small amounts—from fractions of a penny to perhaps a few dollars—for the right to view and optionally download web-based information or software. The challenge, of course, is that it can cost more to collect such amounts than is worthwhile. Most solutions have been based on the aggregation of multiple small accounts, which in turn requires that the micropayment vendor be associated with enough volume and sources of content that aggregation is economically feasible. No micropayment aggregator has come close to achieving this critical mass.
The economics change, however, when micropayments are used for services rather than for content. It's one thing to charge a few pennies to view a document, particularly when consumers may only view one or two documents per month. But in the business-to-business world of web services—where requestors are more likely to use those services more frequently—the aggregated revenues per requestor will be greater. Micropayments may finally succeed for web services where they failed for content. [Source: Loosely Coupled--The Missing Pieces of Web Services]
Posted Wednesday, January 22, 2003 6:59:29 AM
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