A LOOONG time ago, back when Exodus was the world's largest hosting company (with $170 million in annual revenue) and AltaVista was a lot more popular than Google (60 million versus 3.3 million monthly visitors), I wrote an article on Ensim's "OS for hosting".
Ensim had just launched ServerXchange, a software appliance that created multiple private servers on a single physical server. The company was working on AppXchange, a platform through which ServerXchange-enabled web hosting providers would be able to provision, meter usage on, and collect payments for as many as 1000 hosted applications. A mere months later, Ensim pulled the plug on ServerXchange/AppXchange. The software as a service business model wasn't taking off, and ServerXchange's $25000 setup fee was too steep even in the midst of the dotcom boom.
Back in February, Wired did a profile on Allen Morgan, a Mayfield Fund VC who made several recent investments by resurrecting bubble-era business plans. For instance, the Pluck RSS reader is similar in concept to PointCast, a dot-bust that pushed content to users' desktops. According to Morgan, many bright late-1990s ideas were sunk by four fundamental factors:
First, online access was spotty and slow. Second, consumers weren't accustomed to operating online. They didn't trust ecommerce sites with their credit cards and hadn't figured out how to form online communities. Third, search technology was weak. With the advanced algorithmic breakthroughs of Google still years away, it was hard to find what you were looking for. And finally, the online advertising business wasn't yet mature. Marketers didn't entirely believe in it, and nobody had developed a sound model for placing the right ads on the right Web sites.
All of these problems have since been solved. In addition, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson writes in a separate article that open source software has now come of age, and today we have access to much cheaper server hardware and bandwidth. As a result, Morgan predicts that Pluck, for one, will generate $100 million in sales. And Internet IPOs will be back.
Might a Pluck-friendly market environment also be good for SWSoft? When I re-read my mid-2000 article, it struck me that AppXchange sounds a lot like OpenFusion - except Ensim's $25000 proprietary platform is replaced with SWSoft's open API. What's next? A resurrection of Exodus?
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