Telepocalypse

Lebesgue integration for fun and profit

Gregory Narain summarizes at Corante the arguments why pull-based publish/subscribe messaging will supercede push-based email.

To me, there's an interesting follow-on from this. We're seeing the further elimination of the middleman from your communications system. Up until now you've had to rely on an ISP's mail server or service provider's IM system to relay your messages for you. Your pipe provider may even ruthlessly block ports and impose contract terms to force you through their SMTP service.

Updating a RSS feed is no more complex than an file transfer. The data needs to be stored somewhere in a data center, because your laptop goes on and off-line all the time. The storage for that file could be anywhere; it doesn't need to be bonded to your connectivity provider. The "store" is being separated from the "forward". Maybe we need a new metaphor? "Stash and squirt"!

Separating storing from forwarding certainly fits with a general pattern of the communications industry being re-formed from vertical integration into thin, loosely-coupled horizontal layers. I wonder if rather than enless polling of RSS feeds we will see the signal "you have new mail" becoming an intermediary function of its own. That's the bit you will pay for -- the notification of a change out there in the cloud.

It's almost as if there's a general principle forming. In a world of optically-switched fiber and multi-terabyte hard drives, there's no money in storing or forwarding. You can't ask for rent for a product that isn't scarce. But there is money in doing the "dy/dx" on all this and telling people when something has been stored or forwarded.

This "nth-order derivative" principle might have some legs. Consider IBM's On Demand initiative. Ignoring the marketing warmfuzzies they are trying to incite, there's some real substance behind this. One is "scalability on demand". Imagine you have a sudden and unexpected increase in the rate of growth of your business. That's the third derivative (rate of change of acceleration) of "store, process and forward data".

So if you're having trouble making money with your current business model, just do some calculus on it and take the next derivative. No money in retailing fashion clothes? Then try telling people how fashions are changing. No money in that? Which fashions have the greatest rate of change. And so on.

All rather bizarre.