It's been all over the press, and schools are deciding to shut it down. We released a public announcement saying that we had some potential solutions that we were working with, and once we had something concrete we would start implementing it and approach schools.
If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets.
He said this has the potential to be the first broadband killer application, and it has sort of become the truth because obviously it's so bandwidth intensive. I mean, it has been an issue.
So the bandwidth issue is definitely a big concern of ours.
It was very early, and we were still like beta or alpha stage, and so we started receiving a ton of download. The server became overloaded, and that's when I realized that this had a huge market.
I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific, but I could see a system like Napster evolving into something that allows users to locate and retrieve different types of data other than just MP3s or audio files.
Napster works because people who love music share and participate.
I think in terms of the work we're doing now a lot of the UI cleanup... I see it getting much prettier.
Unfortunately, the client that exists today is still pretty much the prototype design.
There really was nothing like it at the time. We had good ideas for implementation, so we proceeded. I think it was an excellent solution to the reliability issues with existing search engines.
But I just really think there is a natural extension into other types of media because it's an excellent system for reliably locating and retrieving content.
I think the most difficult thing had been scaling the infrastructure. Trying to support the response we had received from our users and the number of people that were interested in using the software.
