At one point, the thinking was that Push was tailor-made for television advertising. The idea was to get a marketing message in front of the customer, any time and all the time. What's more, corporations were naturally reluctant about anything which would slow down their networks and Push proved their worst case scenarios. As stories spread about how networks came grinding to a halt because they were overloaded by PointCast, the grand experiment was over. Or at least Part One of the grand experiment.
Truth be told, now's the time to let it all hang out.
At the DEMO 2001 conference in Phoenix, I had a chance to catch up with BackWeb, which is doing some interesting thinking on how to provide transactional delivery services to corporations. Actually, the company has filed a patent on a technology that delivers content only when users are not actively accessing their Internet connections. If this stuff works as advertised, BackWeb may have gold on its hands. Elsewhere, I still think Push can yet make a big mark in the digital music market as a download and delivery technology. With the record labels scrambling to find their balance in a post-Napster world, a little creative thinking is in order on how to exploit Push technology to eradicate download problems for the consumer.