PointCast – Did it fall, or was it…

2000-02-18

This is the way a once-darling of the wired world ends – not with a bang, but a whimper. PointCast is finally giving up the ghost, calling it quits, coughing its last. Nobody notices, nobody cares. The most tragic thing is, the technology it espoused is alive and well. Where, oh where, did things go wrong for PointCast?

Founded in 1992, PointCast was credited for beginning a revolution in Internet usage and was quickly copied by the likes of Microsoft with its Active Desktop channels. However, the dream quickly tarnished as the bandwidth requirements for pushing Internet content to the desktop overcame a number of companies' capabilities, preventing email and “normal” Web browsing activities from taking place. Back in the mid-nineties many organisations were discouraging Internet access at all, as it was seen as distracting individuals from their work. Network Managers banned access to PointCast, the share price plummeted and the company was, eventually sold for a song. Consider this: at the height of its popularity the founder of PointCast, Chris Hassett is reputed to have turned down an offer of $450 million from James Murdoch of News Corporation. In December 1999 the beleaguered company, reputedly losing $2million a month, was bought by Idealab who wanted to use the technology to deliver advertising to customers of its eWallet software. Today the company, now merged with Launchpad to form EntryPoint, is on the brink of launching a new product but there is no guarantee of success now that the hype has gone.

So, where did things go wrong? At the highest level it is possible to say that the technology did not deliver on the hype. The IT industry is one of the best at delivering solutions without feeling that it needs to worry too much about the problems it has to solve. Push technology, like other technological also-rans (such as Document Image Processing and Satellite phones), was a solution without a cause, sold as a new way of working without due thought being given to how it could fit in with established practices. In itself, Push is an enabler, which comes at a cost of bandwidth and administrative overhead. Where the cost-benefit balance has been struck, Push is now establishing itself as a perfectly acceptable solution to a whole variety of problems, such as:

• Automatic distribution of software updates to end-user desktops, as illustrated by Marimba

• Online video-on-demand, for example online training which can be delivered on demand or following a predefined schedule specified by the customers - Multimedia Solutions, Inc. are having some success here

• Download of information to PDAs in idle time, which can then be accessed offline, for example through the service offered by AvantGo.com.

PointCast had the technology right, but aimed its sights at the wrong market. Corporate users, ultimately, had better things to do all day than configure and trawl through the wealth of information they were receiving. They could also do without watching their machines slow to a crawl once every ten minutes, as updates were received. Sure, all these things were configurable, but even that took time. If anything, this is an example of the fickleness of the Web community – in the end PointCast failed because its users couldn’t be bothered with it.

Whilst all this is a shame for the now-defunct company (and particularly for its founder), it is not the end of the technology. Push will continue to find niches where it can render itself indispensable and hence lucrative, for example in corporate information portals (keep an eye on companies like SageMaker). Once Internet bandwidth constraints are removed over the next year or so, Push technology will gain ground in providing real-time video news and sports feeds, consumer video rentals, audio channels and so on. It is no coincidence that this list overlaps with services currently provided by broadcast media. This *is* broadcast, with a difference - it is user selectable in real time. After all, what is Push and Pull, if not supply and demand?

(First published 18 February 2000)