Two Hours of P2P: Why care about P2P?
"The whole p-to-p hoopla is emblematic of the mad rush to find the next big thing in technology," says Bill Burnham, a venture capitalist with Softbank Venture Capital. Edward Jung, a former top software architect at Microsoft Corp., said p-to-p boosters were trying to recreate the excitement of Napster by simply transferring Napster-style technology to other areas. But since Napster is more of a social than a technical phenomenon, "a lot of people were led down the primrose path," Mr. Jung says.
One of the difficulties in assessing the state of p-to-p is semantic. Most people define the term as a computing scheme in which information is stored on many PCs, reducing or eliminating the need for a central repository like a Web server. In the market, however, the phrase has come to describe at least three entirely distinct categories of technologies and companies. None of them, though, are playing out quite as well as boosters had once hoped.
Lee Gomes, Wall Street Journal, P-to-P, B-to-B-R.I.P.?