So, Show Us the Money

What is P2P good for, then? To answer that, let's first look at the potential benefits of an "ideal" P2P implementation, benefits that a business could use for competitive advantage or to implement an entirely new service.

The most talked-about advantage of P2P is its ability to cut bandwidth bills. Imagine how much money companies like Dell, Logitech and Microsoft spend on downloads of products and services? Logitech's generic mouse driver is over 30 MB in size, and the number of its mice being used around the world is countless. A Microsoft Windows service pack can be as big as 300 MB. Now think of how many computers run Windows? (Remember that Apple has less than 25% market share, if that helps.) There are also media distribution companies, web accelerators, distributed back-ups, the list goes on. And every one of these companies could dramatically reduce its bandwidth bill by using P2P. Properly implementing P2P content distribution isn't easy; but when our industry had (almost) more money than it could spend, nobody cared to try it. Today, money isn't just an issue; it's the issue.

Look at Skype. For it, implementing P2P was not optional but mandatory. Creating a free multimedia service for millions of people without spending tens of millions of dollars on "free" infrastructure wasn't (and still isn't) possible. With P2P, Skype was able to provide free phone access without actually subsidizing users (this is not 100% accurate, but accurate enough for this example). All the money it collects from paid users is profit, and yet its creators failed with Joost, not because no ones wants free television, but because Joost had a different infrastructure. People were not into sharing TV as much as they were into simply talking to each other. And then came YouTube, which was funded first by venture capital and then by Google.

Another benefit of P2P is that it requires zero configuration. Skype is probably not the best IP phone around, nor was it the first; but you don't have to be a telecommunications engineer to use it. You download the installer, run it, register yourself as a user, and off you go, from nothing to brilliant conversation in a few minutes.

As with content distribution, implementing a P2P network that requires no configuration isn't an easy task, but it dramatically reduces the number of users who drop off from being intimidated by the technology or feeling they lack the necessary skill. For many services, this is the difference between 100,000 users and 10 million users, or between going out of business as soon as venture money dries up and being profitable within a year.

Zero-configuration P2P has to do with more than just P2P, though. It also implies being able to fully network with zero configuration: the ability to connect any device anywhere using any available connection. Unattended sensors, medical IT devices, military computers, none of these should require in-field configuration. The people who use them generally don't have time to read instruction manuals. They should be able to open the box, insert batteries, and have a workable device within seconds. This is what zero configuration gives users: a choice, not just between high and low profitability, but between life and death.

Even in the case of lower-profile applications, zero-configuration P2P can cut deployment costs tremendously -- and well-implemented P2P platforms could reduce those costs to almost nothing. On such a platform, for example, setting up a new message-processing server for a financial system would be as easy as opening the box, throwing the server on the rack, plugging in the ethernet and power cables, and nothing else.

Ubiquitous connectivity simplifies development costs. Message-passing platforms wouldn't need to account for different types of hosts, relays, connectivity fall-backs, and so on. You would simply confirm that the peer is up and then send it a message. Done. Think of how many networked hosts out there are actually "gateways" between email and text messages, between Internet and Intranets, between X and Y technologies. When one networked device can securely connect with any other, many problems simply evaporate. Before TCP/IP took the world by storm, gazillions of networking technologies existed. No one remembers their names, not because they were inadequate, but because TCP/IP was everywhere, and it's much easier to speak the common language than to teach others a "better" one.

All of these factors are hopefully pushing cloud networking technologies towards commoditization, which would expand markets, decrease infrastructure costs, and allow companies to deliver better products more cheaply.