Chapter 12. P2P Case Studies

Practical peer technology experience to a large extent is as distributed as the technology itself. Many readers have no doubt already experienced some aspect of p2p in one situation or another, often without realizing it was p2p. File sharing, messaging, or some form of Web service at their best are just a natural and transparent extension of a user intention. And it’s really quite amazing in how short a time we take a revolutionary innovation for granted.

Attempting to summarize the state of p2p with well-chosen case studies proves more difficult than anticipated, although one excuse is that most of the field is still highly experimental. Even widely deployed implementations frequently employ beta-test versions of the software, sometimes in the low minor digits. It takes highly optimistic (or foolhardy) companies to aggressively launch market campaigns based on little more than vision.

Or, at least it used to be so. Much of the dot-com bubble was just about just that: marketing the ephemeral visions of some innovator or hyped-up CEO. Sometimes the vision does in the attempt actually manifest a usable product, occasionally even with remarkable powers to change the entire playing field—imagine a world where the aggressive launch (multiple times, as it happens) of a beta-quality Windows operating system had failed and sunk into obscurity. Hmm, indeed.…

Anyway, once the glowing testimonials and press release hype is filtered out, publicized deployment stories are relatively few and far between. Perhaps this lack can be rectified in a next edition, when this book has provided a focus for others, both in terms of potential deployment to relate and a realization that such stories have a value for others yet to take the plunge.