My workplace shares our street with a goodly amount of vacant class A office space. Apparently this space was left vacant by an Application Service Provider that went from being the largest technology employer in the county to bankruptcy court in record time. A few years ago, we were told ASPs were the way of the future - the desktop was dead, and a brave new era of applications served from the net was revolutionizing the way we worked and played. Now most of the revolutionaries are dead and buried, and the few remaining ASPs look like they’re trying to sell to large enterprise customers rather than you, me, and everyone. To me, the interesting question is, “Why?”

It’s because application service providers were trying to serve beef bouillon flavored jello.

More accurately, gelatin dessert, as Jell-O is actually one particular brand of gelatin dessert made by Kraft Foods, Inc. However, the brand is so successful that too few people now realize that translucent, wiggling, fruit-flavored desserts have any other name. And if I write it “jello”, I’m pretty sure I’m not infringing on anyone’s trademark.

Now I’m on the hook to explain what application service providers have to do with unappetizing meat-flavored gelatin desserts. When I was in college, a group of us banded together to stave off starvation. With teams of four or five cooking for the whole group of forty, each of us only had to cook one meal a week to get hot meals all week. Even better, ingredients are cheaper in bulk. Every term, one fool would get himself elected as steward. The steward’s job was to pick out the recipes and order the food.

One day, my team showed up and found neither recipes nor ingredients. A tasmanian devil whirlwind spun down the hall past the kitchen. From somewhere inside it, we heard our steward’s voice. He’d been late ordering the food, so there were no recipes and no ingredients but whatever was left around from last week.

“I’m sorry guys. Just improvise something.” The expertly thrown butcher knife passed through the empty air where he had been, harmlessly lodging in the corridor wall outside the kitchen.

We took stock. We had all manner of oils, vinegars, spices, and basic pantry goods. So far, so good. Main ingredient fodder? We had several heads of lettuce, a couple pounds of butter, and several pounds of popcorn kernels. Lovely.

“Popcorn and salad!” Joseph cried out triumphantly. We sprang into action like the smoothly coordinated team that we weren’t. Patrick and I were assigned to improvise a dessert. The only thing we found even resembling a dessert ingredient was a box of Knox unflavored gelatin. By this time, we were tired, angry, and knew the meal was going to flop anyway. Our eyes came to rest on some beef bouillon cubes. Hot water, beef bouillon cubes for flavor, and gelatin to turn it into a dessert treat. Perfect! We ended up added some red food coloring to give it a bright, cheery, cherry-flavored look.

After a round of death threats for the woefully inadequate salad and popcorn dinner, we took the gelatin dessert trays upstairs and set them down.

“Jello!” People were rising from their seats as soon as we set it down. “What flavor is it?” someone asked. I looked down at the trays.

“Red!” I said with great honesty and conviction.

“Ooh, cherry.”

I barely heard the reply; the din of chairs flying back from the table and hitting the wall was too loud. I kid you not, some people were climbing over the tables to get at our beef bouillon masterpiece. No flatware. No silverware. Just a frenzy of hunger. I cried out for civility, for someone to go get bowls and spoons, but there was just a dissonant growling in response.

Eric was the first to reach the tray. He scooped up a generous mouthful in one hand and tossed it back, chewing. Everything slowed down in that nifty bullet time effect, as I watched his eyes widen and the expression on his face sour from delightful anticipation to horrible realization. As he whirled on his feet and starting clawing his way over the advancing horde, trying to reach the kitchen sink, I could hear him mumbling “Oh shit! Oh shit! OH SHIT!” Colin took one bite, looked down at the remainder in his hand, looked up at me, and I ducked just in time as his helping of dessert sailed harmlessly overhead. Word quickly spread through the ranks that this concoction was beyond foul. I took cover behind a couch as someone - I don’t know who - yelled, “We’re gonna put the rest of this stuff in yer bed!”

My partners in crime and I fell into (actually dove into, intentionally) the same problem I see with application service providers. We were providing our customers with something they really didn’t want and had no incentive to accept. It solved our problem: we needed something called dessert with no dessert ingredients. But it didn’t solve their problem of being hungry after an inadequate meal.

The big advantage of the Application Service Provider business model is that the software vendor gets a steady, predictable source of income rather than having to worry about how many users will buy an upgrade and how much “maintenance” they can get away with charging on a license (as though software needs to be cleaned and oiled periodically). But this doesn’t solve any problems the customer has. In fact, it removes flexibility the user has with traditional desktop apps. If cash is tight, I can always choose not to upgrade some software this year. Microsoft Word hasn’t had a new feature I really needed in over a decade, so I don’t need to upgrade it until I get so far out of date I can’t exchange files with other businesses. With an ASP, I’d be paying a steady stream of cash whether I needed the periodic updates or not, whether I was flush with work or scrambling to stay in business. Good for them, yes, but as a customer, what’s in it for me?

ASPs did claim other benefits. Products would be higher quality because the ASP only had to develop for their own servers, a known and controlled environment. Except that the client environment was still every bit as varied at the customers’ sites. Help desk costs for their customers were supposed to be lower. Except that ASPs didn’t really eliminate the support burden. It just changed the problems users had from “Why has Word been crashing ever since I installed my BouillonSaver screen saver?” to “Why has [ASP application] been broken ever since I upgraded the Gellatinizer 3000 personal firewall?”

Users care about getting their tasks done, and they care about how much they have to spend to do it. Features, usability, quality, price - these things matter. Users, on the whole, couldn’t care less whether the software runs as a desktop app or over “Teh Intarweb.” And ASPs just didn’t offer any substantial improvement in the feature set, quality, or usability of software. They just offered a payment model more convenient for them and less so for customers. They were solving a non-problem of their customers’.

Any time I think of a company trying to make money solving a non-problem, I think of our beef bouillon jello. We used only the finest ingredients, paid careful attention to the cooking, and produced what was probably the finest batch of beef bouillon jello ever made. We had the best possible solution for people craving a wiggly, jiggly, salty, beefy dessert - which, as it turns out, isn’t something our customers wanted.

If you cannot concisely and concretely describe both a typical user of your product and how your product will solve a problem that user has, you better learn to duck and cover, because you’re serving beef bouillon jello.

[Note, now that it’s about a year later — if I can ever carve out some time to post again, I could get a decent article about why web applications are doing so well. The technology’s finally there so it is less trouble to build, deploy, and support a web application, and web apps are offering things you just can’t get from your own desktop, like interaction and collaboration with the rest of the known universe.]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 8:57 am and is filed under Business of Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.