Jon Udell on The Fourth Platform: P2P

Jon Udell posts a response to Marc Andreessen's post about "The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet" in which he says there is a 4th Platform, namely P2P. Interesting idea and he has good points, but there have been very few "legal" apps that have been successful in p2p, namely Skype (and I have a feeling Joost will be successful too), the rest have been for somewhat shady purposes. There has to be real value (eg: free music, free telephony, free TV) for the end user to give up their computers resources to work for others.

Quote from post:

"if we can extend our definition of the cloud to encompass what the Internet originally was: a network of peers. With rare but notable exceptions (e.g. BitTorrent) it hasn’t been that for a long time. I think it will be that again. There’s a level 4 platform waiting in the wings. At level 4, the cloud of storage and computation is partly centralized in a handful of intergalactic clusters, and partly distributed across a network of humble peers. Microsoft’s forthcoming Internet service bus is one example of a level 4 platform. I hope, and expect, we’ll see others."

I would love to see it, I just don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. In fact, I think it's bound to go the opposite direction with thin clients everywhere and all of the processing and storage is in server clouds like EC2.