[Sigia-l] Product for "automated information qualification"?!

[Steven Champeon]

on Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 05:17:33PM -0400, Listera wrote:
> "Steven Champeon" wrote:
> 
> > Remember how "push technology" (a misleading term from the beginning, as
> > it was just scheduled pull) was supposed to help us manage information
> > overload? And how once sysadmins noticed all it did was flood networks
> > with redundant crud and advertising, and it was pointed out to executives
> > that stuff like Pointcast only ran on /idle/ machines, thereby assuring
> > that their employees would only use it when they /weren't working/, it
> > died a quiet death?
> 
> I remember the day Pointcast, allegedly, refused a $400+ million buyout
> offer from News Corp. Those were the days!

Heh.
 
> After various corporate redresses, PointCast is back. Sort of:
> <http://www.pointcast.com/>
> 
> Perhaps more pertinently, the concept of "push" lived on in different
> contexts (such as automatic incremental software updating) with companies
> like: 
> 
> Marimba
> <http://www.marimba.com/>
> 
> BackWeb
> <http://www.backweb.com/>
> 
> Actually, automatic OS updates (like foretold by the recent XP EULA) are a
> type of push technology. Indeed, aspects of web services, RSS, blogs, etc
> can be considered push. So I find the general notion still useful and yet to
> be fully exploited.

You make some good points, and I agree that push is useful for timely
blanket distribution of security updates and so forth, but that's hardly
"push" as information delivery. Email, the true killer app, is the only
push technology that ever worked for information distribution, and you
could be pedantic and call it "client pull" if you're using POP. But the
point remains - overhyped technology solutions for fundamental problems
of communication, information distribution and organization will always
have a negative backlash. Whether the backlash kills the segment of the
industry that spawned such solutions or merely those responsible for the
hype is always TBD and must be considered by any rational observer and
stakeholder when lashing their car to the runaway train.

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