And I've seen first-hand how many of us tire of getting so many cutesy screen saver animations and other digital effluvia. We all quickly turned the push channels off, uninstalled the software, and went back to using our email for some real work. This was a problem, because everyone uses different browser versions, different platforms, and different configurations. Installing browser plug-ins is hard, and not every push vendor supported a wide enough range of operating system platforms either. Contrast this browser situation with email.
Email is pretty much a bread and butter application.
Everyone's email does work differently, but getting messages sent doesn't require you to install extra software on your machine. You just send the message. Early push products ate bandwidth like nothing else, and became a pox upon the network. Products like PointCast behaved so badly that any mention of them could cause a long string of curse words from many IS managers' lips. Push was hungry for bandwidth largely because of some sloppy programming on the part of its creators, who worked with fat Internet pipes and in small companies.