Another failed marriage

Some romances are destined to end badly. Romeo and Juliet. Tom and Nicole. Bonnie and Clyde. Brenda and Eddie, Billy Joel's “popular steadies and the king and the queen of the prom.”

Now you can add yet another heartbroken couple to that list: application service providers and Internet service providers. These two children of the electronic age were the hot couple of 2000 when everyone expected they'd marry and bear prodigious online fruit. Their compatibility was obvious. ISPs had access to the Internet and pipes into the hearts of millions of worldwide users. ASPs had the complementary applications that would sate those millions.

Of course, there were religious differences.

ISPs worship at the residential consumer altar. They tailor their service dial-up and sometimes broadband to a public that is more interested in chats than charts and more willing to surf than plow through rivers of data and work-related applications on the Internet.

ASPs, as their name cleverly implies, provide applications. These include heavy functionality intended to lift the provisioning burden from the shoulders of corporate masters and place it on the Internet. For the most part, corporations worship at the ASP chapel.

Like so many things that we now see as sensible and obvious, these fundamental differences were ignored during the heady days of 1999 and 2000 when every person with a computer was going to be the next Bill Gates and every application was going to be the next Amazon.com.

Fueled by public demand, the happy couple put aside their differences and started shopping for rings. Almost everyone agreed that the marriage was set for 2001, when ISPs and ASPs would, at last, consummate their love affair and enrich the World Wide Web.

But this was true life, not true love.

Like Brenda and Eddie, the ISPs and ASPs “started to fight when the money got tight.” And boy, has the money gotten tight.

Two years ago the most lame-brained idea had money thrown its way like a Hideo Nomo fastball. Unfortunately, like Nomo earlier this year in Baltimore, the moneylenders were pitching to batters who hadn't a clue how to get a hit. This probably explains why Wall Street is no longer willing to toe the mound.

Things have gone askew. Even today's best ideas strike out as the money scales have tilted from airheaded to levelheaded to bullheaded. Today an entrepreneur with a sure-fire cure for cancer, AIDS and smoking addiction is as likely to get funding as a street person is to get food for work.

Thus, the ASP/ISP union is deader than Elvis. Of course, as for Elvis, there are those who still hold vigils of hope for the marriage. In particular, there is a lifeline thread for the potential of a union via broadband (see story on page 46). High-speed data connections, it is supposed, might actually spur ISPs to offer the heavy-duty applications that were supposed to make ASPs a bigger happening than Diana Ross' comeback concert.

But that's just a distant hope. The reality is that the ASP/ISP marriage was never a good idea in the first place. It's more likely they have followed Brenda and Eddie's course “from the high to the low to the end of the show for the rest of their lives.
Contact Jim Barthold at jbarthold@primediabusiness.com.