POINTCAST A SHADOW OF A DOUBT
Sunday, October 30th, 2005
Some folks look at RSS, and all they see is a “been there, don’t wanna do that, again.”
The famously brief success of Pointcast back in the 90’s left us with a number of business lessons, an inconclusive first (and very early) impression of Data Subscription, and the annoying buzz phrase “Push” Technology, which immediately had to be balanced against “Pull” Technology.
Once Pointcast was extinct, and people lacked for an actual example they could study and think about, the “Push” and “Pull” lost their high-tech cache, and very soon nobody knew what they were supposed to mean anymore, beyond their prior significance on the doors of the world.
Then, of course, the bubble burst, and the last thing anybody wanted to think about was a company that had failed before the bubble burst.
For those who don’t remember or were too young, Pointcast gave you ad-subsidized, user-configurable content (news, movie listings, horoscopes, weather, etc.) to the desktop. It ran on a large client-side application you had to download.
Millions did.
Pointcast failed not because it wasn’t popular. It was IMMENSELY popular. It failed because it choked up all the bandwidth of corporate networks, and brought traffic to a crawl. CTO’s told CEOs who told HR Directors who told employees that Pointcast was as bad as a virus, and you’d be fired if you had it installed on your desktop. Well, that’ll put a damper on demand… 
rss | push technology | push | pointcast
