posted by SantaLuca
The Application Server Provider model that Paul Graham discusses in 'The Other Road Ahead' never really materialized for the home user. Wall Street talked a lot about ASPs in the late 1990's, as I remember, but it turned into vaporware and not the 'next big thing'. So, four years later, nothing fundamental has changed on the desktop for the home, non-corporate user.
Application Server Providers did eventually succeed, but on the corporate intranet where he thought they would find little acceptance. The applications aren't spreadsheets or word processors but HR material and forms, online continuing education materials, etc.: things that fulfill a need, very much the way Viaweb did, though accomplished with a different development model of course.
While the prediction in his essay, that ASPs would probably proliferate for the general user, wasn't realized, the essay still has real value. The lasting usefulness, and why we can still profit from reading it four years on, comes from his description of how software startups should work. Many of his other essays touch on the same thing. Reading more of them only hammers in the points that 1)startups must focus on the customer (because you have to sell a product to make money), and 2)that startups must not adopt too rigid a plan that limits the future direction of the project (because you don't know at the beginning where you really need to end up). All this is very nodal business network.
Who can say why ASPs didn't materialize on the home desktop? The answer really doesn't matter for our purposes here since our focus is much more on process needed to build a living systems software.
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