Harder entry means more profit. Given that the Web is only a delivery medium, Saylor reasons that the big money will go to big players who will use it as a new distribution channel for established businesses. The vast databases of companies, like Sears, or American Express, and especially the phone companies cannot be duplicated by a startup, says Saylor, and will profit them first and foremost, then others who can package and resell it. Those other big winners from the coming query tone boom will include firms that have mastered the difficult technology of data management and mining. A bunch of kids in a garage are not going to just jump into that, he believes.
Answers are a lean-bandwidth business.
A last but significant selling point for Saylor's query tone vision is that the great majority of questions do not require much bandwidth to be answered profitably. The strategy sounds almost like a sermon, I feel prompted to announce. We want to put this crystal ball on every desktop and play the role of Prometheus, to take people from the dark to the light, from ignorance to knowledge. This, as the song goes, could be the start of something big.