It was in the spring of 2001, 20 years before the first AI. I remember trying to find a send-fax Web service. Every one I tried was merged or showing signs of advanced website decay. Then I tried HotOffice.com and got a bankruptcy notice. Another site said it wasn't accepting new registrations, but was trying to stay open for its business customers. The free sites were gone, and the pay-for-service sites were all dying.
Yes, we'll be able to tell our grandchildren (or grandbots) about this one. In a short period of time, vast arrays of Web services are gone -- the ugly, bad, and good alike. Some of the best fee-based services were killed by free competitors sustained by crazy money in a lunge for market share; when the climate changed the free services died, but the weakened fee-based services went too.
We'll eventually recover. There are a lot of open niches now, and new species will inhabit them (AOL, MSN, Yahoo? sigh). But we shouldn't miss the very interesting lesson that HotOffice and other ASP services are teaching us.
If you use DBASE for your office, and Ashton-Tate dies, you still have the code and the data. Eventually, you'll need to migrate, but you know the data model, you have the data, it's manageable.
If you use WordPerfect Office and Corel dies, migration is harder. You can still use the application though, you have time.
If you're using HotOffice.com or another bankrupt or withdrawn ASP service to run a business, you're dead. You can't get at your message repositories, you can't get at your data, and you don't have the services. Users have focused on network reliability as an ASP weakness (and it is a big weakness with our immature networks), but the real issue is the inability to migrate from one ASP service to another or from ASP to desktop.
BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2001 > May
