Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
Re: Personal Firewall Day?
From: Adam Shostack <adam () homeport org>
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 13:33:53 -0400
On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 11:39:00AM -0400, Marcus J. Ranum wrote: | Systems like AOL and some of the massively multiplayer games | approach truly effective distribution. The designers of those systems | have also discovered another property of such systems that | probably would scare a lot of you, if you think it through: the | provider of the backend "owns" the system - the software | revenue model pushes toward a rental/service model rather | than an outright purchase as we have under the current | general purpose computing model. That means you'd never really | "own" your software environment... If you didn't pay your | bills your files would no longer be accessible, etc. That would | doubtless make some people extremely uncomfortable but | oddly they are comfortable with exactly that model with cable | TV, cellular, etc. Anyplace where you have an expensive | backend system that represents a large sunk cost, frontended | by a commercial appliance that is relatively "disposable" you | move toward the leased service model. | | I don't think we're ready to go there with computing but I | think that's where we should be going. I think software as a service may be a big win over software as a product. (I'm going to ignore free software for a bit.) Software as a product is nice because you pay for it once, and you're done. But that means that software companies must employ enourmous effort to get more customers on an ongoing basis. Once they've gotten all the customers they can, they need to create new revs of the software that old customers will pay for again. This creates waves of feature-laden, and security-probelm-rich releases, with several extra costs, such as deployment, retraining, and compatability issues. If you buy your software as a service, then the vendor is no longer motivated by their internal economics to create waves of upgrades; they may be motivated by market competition, where someone else produces a better product, and they respond, but that is a customer (or market) driven upgrade. If you buy your software as a service, then the vendor's goal is to keep making small improvements to make the software slightly better in ways that cut the product support cost, such as bug fixes, ease of use enhancements, and better docs. These are all things that make sense in light of service payments. So, I think that a transition from the version grind to service may also entail better security and reliability, because the economics line up that way. [...] | > Have these people taken a genetics course in the last twenty | >years? ;) | | Most of the guys who wrote the "monoculture" paper are | friends of mine and some of them invited me to participate. | I didn't because, honestly, I think they're not writing about | computers and computer security - they're complaining | about customers' purchasing habits, they're complaining | about the "monopoly of mediocrity" and they're rooting for | a non-existent underdog. In other words, that paper was | a political document masquerading as a technical document. Customer's purchasing habits? Would the analysis hold true if MS were just leasing you software? (I'm not sure that a desktop package makes sense as a lease, but then, I'm not sure that it makes sense as a product which hides a flight simulator, either.) Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume _______________________________________________ firewall-wizards mailing list firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com http://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards
Current thread:
- Re: Personal Firewall Day?, (continued)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Crispin Cowan (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Gary Flynn (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Marcus J. Ranum (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? David Lang (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Bill Royds (Oct 11)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Devdas Bhagat (Oct 11)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Devdas Bhagat (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Dragos Ruiu (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Christopher Hicks (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Marcus J. Ranum (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Adam Shostack (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? R. DuFresne (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Frank Knobbe (Oct 16)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Marcus J. Ranum (Oct 07)
- Re: OfficeTV (was: Personal Firewall Day?) Dragos Ruiu (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? David Lang (Oct 06)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Adam Shostack (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Crispin Cowan (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? Achim Dreyer (Oct 07)
- Re: Personal Firewall Day? avraham shir-el (arthur sherman) (Oct 07)