When Gore, Doerr, Andreessen, and a throng of Silicon Valley CEOs are doodling on White House whiteboards, plotting to save the public schools with "push," either the technology is shooting into orbit or everybody's simply high as a kite. At the moment, both seem to be true.
Whether the push craze is catching air or merely hyperventilating, a major leap of faith is involved. Tragically, most push believers don't even recognize just how many steps they've taken past the edge of the cliff. Simply put, the major push platforms - Internet Explorer 4.0, Netcaster, and PointCast included - obliterate even the simplest usage metrics and advertising mechanisms that drive conventional Web publishing. Not in a radical, paradigm-busting sense, but in a backward, revenue-busting, ticking-time-bomb manner.
As always, the fatal flaws lie in the features. The entire premise of push revolves around marginally sophisticated caching. Subscribe once, and the software downloads everything, every day, while you're idling - ready to be accessed rapidly off your hard drive instead of sluggishly from halfway across the world. Ingeniously simple? Sure, if accurate stats on who's reading what and how much no longer matter. Of course, they're the only thing that matters, but they cease to be available, in any reliable sense. Once people subscribe to a channel, they instantly appear to become total converts, seemingly reading every page of the site daily, never growing bored or remiss in their fanaticism. Until they take the trouble to unsubscribe, uninstall, or turn off their machines, if ever.
Consider the dream economy created by IE 4, in which one must subscribe before even sampling a channel for the first time. Effectively, this turns the standard trend of Web usage, where nine out of ten visitors never return, on its head. It's swell for the egos of new-media publishers, who are astonished to see how quickly their cutting-edge projects are catching fire in the public imagination, but, sooner or later, the advertising community is bound to cry foul: "Why are so few people clicking on our ads?" Not sure. "How many people are actually seeing them?" Somewhere between zero and many. We're optimistic, but we don't know exactly. "What do you know?" Not much. But we're optimistic.
If Microsoft, Netscape, and PointCast don't make accurate reporting their top priority, how far will the push trend's momentum take it, aside from Gore's dreaming and Valley execs' scheming? Not very.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
